Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild looks a lot like Nintendo promised: The biggest Zelda game ever and a return to the open-world genre the series created back in the NES days. Everything we’ve seen at E3, besides maybe the actual graphics, is pretty impressive… and a pretty big departure from Zelda conventions. It’s got weapons and equipment with stats! It has survival elements! This is big stuff, taken straight from the playbook of Skyrim and The Witcher 3. That’s great news, but the question remains—will Breath of the Wild adopt what really matters from its open-world influences?
Zelda Is An RPG Again, So Let’s See Some Role-Playing
Breath of the Wild clearly swings the pendulum back toward the RPG genre, and that’s a good thing. An open-world Zelda with just three or four swords in the whole game wouldn’t be very interesting. Bringing back those RPG conventions will make the series feel fresh, and add a little impetus to all that exploration.
But the real joy of other big open-world RPGs isn’t just about finding the best gear. It’s about the quests. Skyrim and Witcher 3 are both filled with dungeons to explore, but the driving impetus behind both games—especially Witcher—is questing, driven by unique storylines. Witcher’s quests were truly exceptional and narratively-driven and that’s probably more than we can expect from Breath of the Wild. We won’t be seeing a Bloody Baron in a Zelda game, that’s for sure. But even Skyrim’s regular quests had a narrative impetus behind them—either something related to the guilds, or the Skyrim civil war, or the main storyline, or the community you got the quest in.
Just being an open-world game isn’t enough. Breath of the Wild is clearly wildly expansive, and filled with cool places and interesting challenges. But it needs to give Link a reason to go to some of these places, beyond just the joy of exploration. It needs questing, towns, a narrative momentum to drive Link to discover the secrets of the wild. If it can pull that off, the game may be able to achieve its place at the pinnacle of the open-world genre. And we just don’t know enough yet to say one way or the other.
