Breath of the Wild Director Inspired by Minecraft and Terraria

It’s been over a week since the launch of Breath of the Wild, and many have noticed that the game certainly takes inspiration from a number of other games. The game’s director, Hidemaro Fujibayashi recently spoke with EDGE magazine about his inspiration and what influenced Breath of the Wild’s development:

“I was rather inspired by playing Minecraft and Terraria. I was able to learn from the gameplay and the possibilities found in. I could learn from the sense of adventure, exploration and how it inspired curiosity.

… things like cave diving where you actually go down into the water to get into the cave, as well as rafting tours and so on. I know this may not be such a big deal in the west, but in Japan it’s quite an adventure!

More than anything, what’s influenced my personal understanding of what a Zelda game should be has been the teachings I’ve received from Shigeru Miyamoto in the 15 years since the Oracle games. I really feel that it’s not because of knowledge or experience that I’m here working as a developer for Zelda, but because of the people.” – Hidemaro Fujibayashi

When speaking about developing for the Nintendo Switch and comparing it to previous Nintendo devices:

“Of course, we didn’t have a huge amount of leeway in terms of time. But as director I wasn’t particularly fazed by this. I have a very strong impression that work proceeded without panic under the specific instructions of our producer, Mr. Aonuma. Personally, when I started thinking about what kind of features the Nintendo Switch hardware had, I ended up thinking about whether we could add in any new ideas, which looking back on it now was probably not the best thing to be thinking of at the time!

The Oracle games and The Minish Cap were 2D pixel-art games released on the Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance. Compared to the Wii, Wii U or Nintendo Switch, graphically they can’t even begin to match up – the kinds of animations, the text we can show, the audio, and storage space are definitely not comparable. The most notable difference is simply that we can no longer ‘fudge’ things when it comes to anything graphical. What we have previously left up to players’ imaginations can all now be shown for real, so continuing to use our previous methods of expression would lead to some very odd experiences for players.”- Hidemaro Fujibayashi

Finally, on Nintendo’s hardware and how Zelda demonstrates it’s capabilities:

“Actually, I don’t really think of only Zelda games being especially appropriate for drawing out the abilities of Nintendo’s hardware. However, solving puzzles is at the root of Zelda games, so maybe it is this way simply because the puzzle solving gameplay allows us to show off new features in a very easy-to-understand way.” – Hidemaro Fujibayashi

Source: Nintendo Everything