How Skyrim Influenced The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild’s Development

Developers at Nintendo don’t usually look at other games to get inspiration for their titles. However there’s one exception to this – The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

In an GameSpot interview with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild producer Eiji Aonuma and game director Hidemaro Fujibayashi, the duo revealed that Nintendo developers played The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim to find out the challenges of making an open world game. After all, Breath of the Wild is Nintendo’s biggest open world game up till today.

Check out what Aonuma and Fujibayashi have to say below.

Aonuma: In the past I’ve also actually said that I have played Skyrim, so it’s not necessarily that I don’t play games. But we don’t look at it from, ‘Oh, what kind of things can we take from this game?’ It’s more of like, ‘How can we prepare for this? What should we expect from games like this?’ And so we also think about how many people we might need, or how we can make it improved, or with the number of people. We would collect data and then work and see what worked, what didn’t.

Fujibayashi: I don’t actually myself play a lot of other games. I obviously am well versed in them, I know what’s happening in them. But this ending up in this kind of bigger open world really started from the prototype stage where, just kind of naturally by virtue of what we wanted to do in this game, we started to realize that we absolutely do need this bigger open world in order to make the kind of game that we wanted.