I've spent this weekend playing Breath of the Wild pretty much nonstop, and I have thoughts.

I saw a tweet on this website earlier today, where the person was saying that the game is boring. I can totally see how someone can make that mistake.

If you come into BotW expecting an action/adventure, you will be disappointed because the game is adventure/action instead.

I'm going to preface anything else I might say below with this:

Breath of the Wild (even without finishing it) is the best AAA open-world I have ever played, hands down – nothing else comes close. Outside of AAA, the only competitors it has are Disco Elysium and Outer Wilds.

Most of BotW's magic is due to three things:

- its quest system
- its consistent and reliable world systems
- its laser focus and absolute commitment to these two things listed above

Its quest system is straight outta vanilla WoW and similar RPG games circa 2000–2004: no quest marker beyond what you might place yourself, no hand-holding, asking the player to actively engage with both the writing and the environment. But it's polished to modern standards.

When an NPC tells you to look at a mountain, they point in the direction of the mountain peak. And, because at no point does the game deviate from its "no quest markers" rule, you ACTUALLY LOOK AT THE MOUNTAIN PEAK.

And you remember the mountain's stupid name, for Pete's sake.

At this point, you might start going toward the mountain, but will soon realize that you don't have enough stamina to scale it. You'll then open the map and notice that there's an alternative path on the other side... (1/2)

...so you'll make a plan to go around and through the forest, bump into 10 completely unrelated things on the way, totally forget about the initial quest you had, complete 3 different quests by accident, and at this point, you're playing BotW the way God intended. (2/2)

The only reason why this works is that the quest system in BotW ditches traditional staples of computer RPG quests almost entirely (with very few exceptions). Things NPCs refer to mostly are there regardless of the NPCs. No quest items spawn when you talk to quest-givers.

NPCs exist in service of the world, not the other way around. It's a sandbox for you to do things in, and NPCs are simply there to give you helpful advice on how to approach it. If you don't talk to them – fine! It doesn't matter. Most quests don't even have (or need) rewards.

When doing things in the world is its own reward – and is rewarding enough that you want to keep doing it for hours and days, you don't need people arbitrarily tossing a coin to the witcher. I just can't get over how awesome that is.

There's a shit ton of content in BotW – most of it totally bespoke and hand-scripted. You poke a rock, and unique content spills out. But what this unique content isn't is mission-related. There's almost no mission-related content except for the main storyline (also non-linear).

They removed all the ungodly man-months of hellish scripting of quest logic from your run-of-the-mill AAA open world game and instead, put those resources into making world encounters. What the fuck. Why haven't we all done this before? It makes so. Much. Sense.

This brings me to my second point: the world systems. The rain. The cold. The fire. The ice. The metal. The water. All of it serves one purpose and one purpose only: making the level scripter's work as streamlined as possible, enabling them to do a lot of it.

The level scripter gets to use what's there and doesn't have to (some will say doesn't *get* to) invent their own systems for each world encounter and instead, works with what is already there. The benefit of it is obvious: it's WAY faster to do a lot of custom content this way.

One notable downside of this approach is production-related and boring: a LOT of systems need to be either online or planned with a high enough degree of certainty before any level work can realistically get going. And there has to be a high volume of these systems in the game.

If there aren't enough systems, people won't be able to use them to express their creativity, and so you won't have any exciting world encounters either. Imagine Minecraft, but you only have wood and dirt. This is what most AAA games have. Metal and coal are mission-specific.

Finally, Breath of the Wild stays committed to its main pillar:

The open world in the game, everything else is game-adjacent.

and is wholly structured around it with the shrines, the tree people, the map, the compass, the stamina, the ability system, the inventory, etc.

The upfront investment must have been tremendous on this project. I'm 90% sure the game was entirely redone from scratch several times over before it reached its current sublime form. I haven't read any interviews with the developers, but the vision shines bright in this one.

In many ways, BotW has more in common with Minecraft and Planet Zoo than it does with Assassin's Creed.

Yes, there are map-revealing towers. Yes, there's progression. Yes, there's great melee combat.

It's superficially similar, but is, in fact, a game in a different genre.

I should add that this is NOT a critique of any other open-world games – my main point here is that Breath of the Wild is its own category of game. It's not a story-driven action game with some adventuring, it's a kind of novel adventure game with some action sprinkled on top.