I've written previously about how Breath of the Wild's wide-open design blasts previous 3D Zelda games' pacing issues aside. But the games arguably had an even more fundamental problem, a linearity frequently referred to as 'key and lock' design, where one item (say, the gale boomerang) solves a particular situation, but is useless unless the circumstances call for it, specifically.YouTube user Turbo Button (via a post at Gamasutra) just posted a video showing precisely how Breath of the Wild eschews this in favor of a much more organic world."Puzzles were often more about what lock you're looking at, which they never really tried to hide," Turbo Button says of the older games. "In Breath of the Wild, the world IS the game, so items are made to fit the world, rather than the other way around.""Instead of the thought process being 'how do we give this dungeon a unique gimmick?' it's 'how do we make this item interact with the sandbox?'"He then gives examples, like cryosis (the freezing rune, which allows you to conjure blocks of ice in any body of water), and the flexible design that allows players multiple solutions (like the ability to paraglide to a new cliff, or to cut down a tree to make a makeshift bridge), to illustrate this.I never minded this more linear design conceit in the past, since the best dungeons in the games were designed very cleverly around it, and always put me in a sort of adventurer flow state: solving puzzles one minute, jumping across chasms the next, attacking a giant boss the next—but I suspect it will be difficult to go back, now that I've tasted the sweet "open-air" of Breath of the Wild.Coming from a huge Zelda fan, that's telling of just how much Breath of the Wild has (successfully) reinvented the series.
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