How Skyrim Influenced Breath Of The Wild

How Skyrim Influenced Breath Of The Wild

Back when The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was in early development the team had said that they had drawn influences from Bethesda’s open world game, The Elder Scrolls V – Skyrim.

In a recent interview with GameSpot The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild producer Eiji Aonuma and game director Hidemaro Fujibayashi revealed that they both played through Skyrim to find out the challenge of making a giant open world game.

BOTW Team on Skyrim

In the past I’ve also actually said that I have played Skyrim, so it’s not necessarily that I don’t play games, Aonuma stated. 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, he continued. We would collect data and then work and see what worked, what didn’t.

I don’t actually myself play a lot of other games, Fujibayashi explained through a translator. 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.

It is still very interesting to see how titles from other companies can still influence a solid franchise like The Legend of Zelda. Are there still things from Skyrim you would have liked to have seen brought over to Breath of the Wild?