Writing article: What can Zelda:BotW teach us?

[OliverM]

I am writing an article about the influence Nintendo's wildly successful new Zelda title, 'The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild' is having on designers of upcoming games. Are you drawing lessons or inspiration from it? Has it affected the design of a game you're working on? If so, I'd like to talk to you!

 

[adrix89]

I'm not sure you can say anything new about it. It has been analyzed to death already.
Joseph Anderson made a big video delving into most of the issues:


What it does bad is a botched combat but passable, not enough enemy variety, the puzzle dungeon rooms are weak and the durability that everyone complains about could have been setup a little better.

What it does great. Durability, the concept is absolutely essential for exploration games. It could act like ammo in old FPS games and those games were full of secrets. Old FPS was all about using the right weapon in the right context for the highest efficiency managing a finite resource.
What durability system needs is to do is efficient trade of damage and durability similar to how you do trades of mana with the cards on the board in a game like Heartstone. Enemies having multiple resistance for multiple damage types or even outright negation can force you to use some weapons or think creatively which BotW is great at doing.
Something like against ice enemies you can trade efficiently with fire weapons but that means you will eventually run out of fire weapons as ice enemies drop ice weapons.

Another thing is while I hate "Towers" in open world games with a passion it has been done great here and the map and landmarks are perfect. You don't need to show sidequests, activities and collectables on the map ever.
Maps should act like the real world and only show places as in towns,shops, inns and roads.

 

[Mastermind]

I'm guessing "losing your virginity" won't be on the list.