Eiji Aonuma Wants to Keep Future Zelda Game as Open as Breath of the Wild

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is still attracting players who want to experience everything the game has to offer, but it’s extremely popular with speed runners and streamers as well. Players are managing to complete the game in just a few short hours, which is an impressive feat no matter how you look at it.

That open sense of exploration and the way players approach it with their own alternate solutions and approaches was apparently something producer Eiji Aonuma and game director Hidemaro Fujibayashi had planned on coming to fruition all along.

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In an interview with IGN, Fujibayashi confirmed this, saying “A big theme of this game was that there should be multiple answers, multiple methods, multiple ways of doing anything.” It doesn’t come as a particular surprise that this was an intended side effect of the game’s massive amount of content and open world experience, especially since fans have really gone crazy with finding their own solutions and progressing through the game in a manner that makes sense for them individually. 

Eiji Aonuma is on board with the “incredible freedom” offered by the game, and thinks that it’s something that “needs to be maintained in Zelda games” in the future. “My eyes have been opened to how important that is,” he said. 

It looks like Zelda games coming down the pipeline will incorporate much of the same kind of content, especially since its creators are interested in preserving this kind of player interaction. That means the next Zelda game could open up even further and allow you to do much more than you previously imagined. If that’s the case, we could be looking at an even more intriguing Zelda than ever before. Here’s hoping you can actually do more with the dogs next time. 

Given how popular the “Can You Pet the Dog” Twitter account became, there’s clearly an audience that wants to be able to interact with dogs in their games. Petting dogs, training them, and keeping them as companions appears in some titles, but it’s still underutilized in almost every genre. The next Zelda game could certainly benefit from allowing players to keep a dog companion.