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A huge, in-depth interview about the creation of the world in Breath of the Wild, featuring the Art Director, the lead “Buildings” designer, and one of the Terrain Designers.
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September, 2019
Satoru Takizawa
Joined Nintendo in the year 1995. He’s been part of the Zelda Series since the N64 game Ocarina of Time and involved in many titles as a designer. He’s the art director for both Breath of the Wild and its sequel.
Manabu Takehara
After working in a Tokyo-based game company, he joined Nintendo in the year 2011. After working on Mario Kart 8 and other titles, he worked on Breath of the Wild as the leader of the buildings team within the terrain designers. He’s the supervisor of terrain designers in the sequel.
Yohei Izumi
Joined Nintendo in the year 2008. He’s been part of the development of the Spirit Tracks and Skyward Sword titles of the Zelda series, and in Breath of the Wild he worked in terrain designer of the northern areas amongst others. In the sequel he’s the leader of the terrain designers.
Interviewer: What did you think when you were developing Breath of the Wild, gentlemen of the development staff?
Takizawa: I, as the Art Director, had to constantly think about how to create a living world. I was constantly thinking of how to increase the sense of immersion for the players, such as representing the animals’ mode of life in a realistic manner, how to show changes in weather and the passage of time, or how to make them feel that there was a real world within the game.
Takehara: I was in charge of building and directing the creation of all buildings in the cities and villages, and I was terrain design lead in the DLC. I did think of making a world that the players would agree with and wouldn’t feel out of place. A lot of people live in the settlements, and while looking back on my own experiences, I considered adding a lot of detail to make the settlements’ odd buildings feel inhabited and with a human flavor to it. It’s not told in-game, but as a background setting, most settlements have their local industries.
Takizawa: Talking about our personal experiences, in the office we often talked about “adventuring into the back mountains”. We climbed and explored the mountains in the area, met wild animals, collected mushrooms. We wanted to relive those experiences we had as kids; that was a common topic of conversation amongst the staff.
Takehara: True. We often discussed formative experiences from our youth during the game’s development. I’ll mention something the terrain lead [Ed: likely Makoto Yonezu] told me when the Breath of the Wild team met together: The grass that grows all over Hyrule is an idea that originated from a formative experience, too. “The grass fluttering with the wind”, “the feeling of adventure as you push your way through the grass”, these experiences create presence. He thought that they would help establish the worldview that even after the calamity “beautiful nature remains regardless of human life”.
He then asked the programmers to “grow a lot of grass in the game!”, and the end result was a volume of moving grass far past his imagination, resulting in him crying from joy. The planner also answered to that, suggesting to leave elements from past games such as cutting the grass to find things, to make it fit the gameplay of Breath of the Wild. In the end the grass became a must-have in the terrain of the game.
The grass idea came from the formative experience, it became possible to place a lot of grass and in the end the whole team worked to finish the game up as a final product. When I heard this anecdote, I felt like it was a classical tale in the history of the Zelda Team.
Izumi: I worked on the design of the shrines and Sheikah Towers as well as the northern areas. At the start of the project, once I was told the vision of the project, I thought “and how are we going to make such a wide world?” But when the actual work began, the programmers had readied a work environment that I’d never seen before. You normally model the things in a PC and then export them into the real game; that’s the usual workflow. But in the Breath of the Wild work environment you could directly interact with the terrain of the game itself in any way you saw fit.
When moving Link around, I could calibrate things at once like “let’s make this hill 1 meter taller”, and the time you saved in work could be used to play the game or to create new things. The work of creating the land of Hyrule was like the oil-based clay I used when I was a child for sculpting, in the sense that you slowly add in more force and check the result. I went on making all kinds of terrain in that way, and by repeating that detailed work over and over again we ended up creating that huge world.
Interviewer: Making such a huge world must’ve been very hard, yes.
Izumi: Yes. When I was first told that “you can climb up walls”, my perception as terrain designer shifted from “wall” meaning “you can’t go” to “road”, because now you can climb it. The change in workload was comparable to the transition from 2D games to 3D games and I did assume it’d be a very hard task. But, for example, when climbing a tall spot, it was fun thinking where to place the rocks in the mountainside of the cliffs. It was a very long development and there were some mishaps, of course, but I had a lot of fun thinking about how to make the gameplay, and this compensates for all the mishaps. I went on making things moved by fun that overwrote that stress.
Interviewer: Within that long development, what other things did you say during the making?
Takizawa: We were often told “don’t be exceedingly receptive”. The gameplay in the terrains was often thought together between the planners and the terrain designers but they focused to make it natural and not too obvious.
Takehara: True. This leads to the game nature of Breath of the Wild, and making something obviously guiding the users stands out, you think that the game is playing you instead. So we were careful to avoid that. It depends on the situation but in most cases we kept it to a sensation of “there might be something there”, carrying out calibrations like that often.