Those who know me know that I’m a bit of a dork. Those of you who don’t know me probably also know that I’m a dork. I mean, my current photo on this website is of me wearing a dinosaur dress-shirt with a book-laden bow-tie. Pretty sure you get the idea.
As a dork, I love video games. My wife and I have our own Nintendo Switch, and we play a ton. Like many gamers, I have a tendency to play one game a lot until I’ve driven all sense of fun from it into the ground. I did that with the PC release of Horizon: Zero Dawn a few months back, I’m sure I’ll do it with Among Us right now, and my wife and I absolutely did it with Animal Crossing: New Horizons when the pandemic first started (and, honestly, who didn’t?).
But there’s one game I keep coming back to, time and time again. I’ve logged close to 500 hours in it already and have beaten it multiple times, and yet every few months I just get an itch to go back to it. What game, you ask?
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is still considered one of the best-selling games right now. The subreddit dedicated to the game still regularly has thousands of people online at the same time. So I’m not alone in my joy of it. But why? Is it simply because it has a franchised name? Is it because now the Switch is the must-have device during our pandemic blues?
I don’t think so.
I think the reason Breath of the Wild continues to sell and continues to be played is because of one very simple element. Something that many open-world RPGs have been sorely lacking as of late.
The Spirit of Adventure
Open-world games are the in-thing with regards to game design right now. Between Minecraft, Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, Fallout, Skyrim, Horizon:Zero Dawn…well, you get the idea. There’s a lot of games coming from triple-A developers that are focused on a free, open world. And there’s good reason for that. As technology develops and a new generation grows up, their focus becomes finding moments, of being popular or famous for even just a few seconds. Open worlds play in to that; they give the player choice to make their own decisions, which in turn allows players to create their own vignettes, their own moments that can make a game become popular.
Breath of the Wild takes that a step further. With the exception to Minecraft, every other game listed previously has a clear set of quests and tasks you have to complete in order to finish the game. If you want to fight that final boss and get that desired end screen, you have to save this village, or rescue this person, or fight this enemy. You don’t have a choice in the matter; it’s required that you do these things in a set order.
In Breath of the Wild, however, that idea is thrown out. You have a brief tutorial area where you get to hone your skills and learn the different mechanics that are available to you, but from that point on you get to decide where to go and what to do. Want to go and fight the final boss immediately? Go for it. Want to go and start beating all of the mini-bosses, gaining health and new abilities that will make the final boss fight a lot easier? Sure! Want to wander around aimlessly and follow none of the major quests for days upon days? That’s your decision.
This amount of complete freedom can feel a bit daunting, especially when you’re used to the formula of following a specific set of directions. But it pays off. In the end, Breath of the Wild feels like your adventure, not someone else’s . You’re the player, the hero, the maniacal pyromaniac. You may not get to change Link’s name, but you decide the type of character Link gets to be. And so, ultimately, the adventure is yours.
That kind of freedom is exhilarating, and largely the reason why I feel like I can keep coming back to it again and again. Maybe this next time I’ll try and learn that trick I saw from a speedrunner. Maybe I’ll go for all of the shrines first before fighting any of the mini-bosses. Or, ooh! maybe I’ll just go off and try to defeat a Guardian using only a single stick.
The point is: that immense level of freedom is, well, freeing. Some games like Skyrim get replayability because community-made mods add content. Others, like Horizon: Zero Dawn, are replayed because of an epic story. But with Breath of the Wild, I play it again and again because, especially right now, it makes me feel like I have a little bit of control. In the game, my life gets to be my own. And sure, that life involves being repeatedly murdered by brutal, unforgiving enemies again and again, but it’s my fault for going off and pretending to be the Steve Irwin on an expedition (“Look at that fella there! That’s a black Moblin. I’m gonna go poke it with a stick.”).
I hope Nintendo learns from Zelda‘s success. This kind of game rocks. And with a prequel coming out next month, and a sequel coming out sometime in the next year (if we’re lucky), it looks I’ll have plenty of adventures to go on for a good long while.
Jacob Ryckman 