A Zelda: Breath Of The Wild Interview Revealed Details On The Story, Upgrades, Rupees & More

Another Zelda: Breath of the Wild interview with various Nintendo figures on IGN has revealed more details on the game. The first thing revealed was rupees. Aonuma said that “Rupees do exist, but the reason for their existence is a little different this time around. As you saw it’s not about going to cutting down grass and collect rupees or find them in treasure chests but it’s about collecting things and going to sell them and then using the rupees you get to buy new things. The rupees are there but they serve a different purpose”. Upgrades were also mentioned. Aonuma says “the upgrade path is very Zelda-like”, but after being asked by IGN on whether they should “assume it takes place within towns and leave it at that”, Aonuma said “not quite” and laughed.

As for the story, there were some things hinted. Aonuma talked about the arrow seen in the trailer, explaining that “yes, you’re right that arrow is definitely an important part of the game and actually getting that arrow is very important to navigating the game. To reveal it now would be a spoiler so I don’t want to say too much”. As for his blue outfit, Aonuma says “the clothes he’s wearing right now is actually the same clothes that he was wearing in the trailer that we’ve shown previously. We thought that having him wear this tunic for this demo would make it a little more familiar to people watching the game demo and trailer this time around. Link gets that blue suit at a very important juncture in the storyline, and we also showed suit of armor you can get too. There’s also times when Link will venture out into the cold and he’ll need to appropriately equip himself, so there’s definitely a lot of variation types of clothes he can wear”.

Miyamoto & Bill Trinen also had some things to say about the story. Miyamoto says that “this game has a heavy focus on experience and also freedom. It’s not really story heavy. You can choose to do all of the tasks and all of the missions and you’ll still get to the end, or you could choose not to do all of them, and you can still get to the end. The story isn’t as clear-cut as it was in the past with the existence of Ganon, Link, and Zelda. With this one it’s a little bit more vague. You’ll kind of feel what Ganon is, and you’re going to feel maybe this is what Zelda is like, or this is what Link is like. It’s really Link’s adventure in discovering all of that”. As for Trinen, he said that “they’ve done a really good job of weaving the story into the world, giving you just enough direction to know, generally, where you need to go to pursue it. If you’re off doing other things and you decide you want to go complete the Shrines, or you want to go climb mountains, or you want to go look at deer in the field, or find that pond that had all the ducks in the trailer, you can do that. I get into the game and then go off to do random things. Then, maybe after a couple of days of playing, I’ll think that maybe I should actually go to that place [someone I met in the story] talked about. Then, you go there and get enough clues to point you in [the next] direction. It’s does a really good job of guiding you to where the story is, but it still feels like a sort of chance encounter out in the world when you come across somebody who has a role to move the story forward”.

Finally, Miyamoto talked about the open-world gaming formula. He explains that “sandbox games is what they’re typically called here, but before anybody called them sandbox games, I always described Nintendo games as being a garden in a box. Zelda is a garden in a box game where the player can freely go around and experience [the world]. There are quests. Sometimes we call them little chores that we need to do, but there are missions. On the systems side, you get a list of missions that’s easy to look into and check on”.

Source