Zelda Team Claims They’ve Cracked The Secret of Open-World Storytelling
Open-world games are great, but they’ve historically lacked in one category: story. This is due to the nature of the game itself: stories are linear, and if you’re given the freedom to do whatever you want, controlling the flow of the story becomes impossible. Or does it?
Today Game Informer published a video interview with Zelda creator Shigeru Muyamoto and Eiji Aonuma, producer of the next big Zelda game, Breath of the Wild. Since it appears to be an open-world game, they were asked about this problem — and Miyamoto just smiled and said Aonuma “knows how to do it.”
“There is a little bit of a trick that I implemented this time,” Aonuma explained. “This idea is something I’ve had since I started developing games 20-some odd years ago. So I really want you to look forward to playing the game and finding this something that I put in there.”
So no, they’re not going to tell you what the solution to open-world storytelling is — at least, not without your forking over 60 bucks next month. But while they were sitting down, Miyamoto wanted to set the record straight about his past comments regarding story in games. Many people believe he just doesn’t care (why else would every Mario game use the same plot?) He said it wasn’t so.
“I might have said things like that, but it’s not that I think that story is unnecessary,” he told GI. “When you’re playing a game, the story is there to give the big world you’re in some substance and meat. And because you’re the protagonist in the game, that’s what you should be doing. I think, also, when a story is set too strictly already, you can only follow a certain path. There’s also times where it takes so much time to set up the story, that you just want to get into the gameplay, but you can’t because there’s so much setup.”
“But that’s not the case for Breath of the Wild, right?” he commented to Aonuma. who agreed and nodded. Zelda: Breath of the Wild comes out March 3 for Wii U and the new Switch; the secrets of open-world storytelling are apparently held within, probably inside a treasure chest. Da-da-da-daaaa!