The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (BOTW) is an open-world action-adventure game developed by Nintendo and released in 2017. Players take on the role of Link, a warrior who awakens with no memory and must defeat the evil Calamity Ganon to save the kingdom of Hyrule. The game is widely praised for its open-world design, and after playing it myself, I understand why. BOTW does not just build a world for you to look at. It builds one you genuinely want to live in.
My Experience
The most striking thing about BOTW is how open it feels. The game never harshly punishes you for exploring, and it allows for wildly different playstyles without ever forcing you to commit to one. Some players sprint toward the main objectives, while others spend hours just riding and caring for horses, which is honestly what I found myself doing early on. What makes this interesting is that unlike Minecraft, where you choose at the start whether to play survival or creative mode, BOTW lets you weave between these modes fluidly.
Since this was one of my first games, I was not confident in combat, so I naturally leaned into exploration first. But as I explored, something happened without me noticing: I was leveling up passively, building confidence, and gradually aligning my goals with the ones the designers intended. I felt like I was growing alongside Link, which made it easy to project my own personality onto him and feel a real sense of personal investment in the world.
Part of what makes this possible is a deliberate design choice I discovered while researching the game: the triangle rule. The landscape of Hyrule is largely composed of triangular shapes, including hills, mountains, and rocks shaped like cones and pyramids. This is not just aesthetic. Triangles naturally guide the eye toward their peaks, where the designers place points of interest. They also block whatever is behind them, which means you are rarely overwhelmed by too many objectives at once (helpful to me as a novice gamer). As you move toward one landmark, new terrain gradually reveals itself behind it, creating a constant sense of surprise and curiosity. This produces a breadcrumb effect where you are pulled from one location to the next almost without realizing it. You might set out in one direction, get distracted by something new on the horizon, abandon your original plan, and then circle back, only to get distracted again. Somehow, you still end up at a Sheikah tower – a central goal of the game as it unlocks a new region of the map. The world guides you without ever feeling like it is forcing you anywhere, which makes the experience feel organic rather than scripted.
Connection to Class Concepts
Using the MDA framework, this design works primarily at the level of mechanics and aesthetics together. The formal elements of open terrain and flexible objectives produce the aesthetic experience of curiosity, freedom, and genuine investment. This connects directly to the article we read on the psychology of world building, which argues that immersive worlds are built outward from character, not inward from setting. BOTW is a fascinating case study here because Link is intentionally a blank slate. He has no spoken dialogue and an amnesiac backstory, which means the player fills in the emotional gaps. Rather than filtering the world through a character with strong opinions, the game hands that filter directly to you. The supporting cast, the surrounding landscape, and the society of Hyrule all read differently depending on what you bring to the game yourself, which aligns with the article’s point that character perspective shapes how the world feels to the reader or, in this case, the player.
Ethics
In BOTW, the major races of Hyrule, including the Zora, Gorons, Gerudo, and Rito, each have biologically based traits tied to their physiology. Zora are aquatic, Gorons are fireproof, and Gerudo are an almost entirely female race. These traits feel more ecological than hierarchical, since no race is explicitly framed as superior, and each plays a meaningful role in the world. However, the Gerudo’s biological essentialism, specifically that only one male is born to the tribe per century, does root gender and identity in biology in a way worth questioning. A thoughtful mod might decouple these physical traits from cultural identity, allowing players to explore the distinction between what a body can do and what a society expects from it. This would create space for characters whose traits are shaped by choice and environment rather than birth, which feels more honest to how identity actually works.
