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The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Zelda rebuilt around physics, chemistry and an open map

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Nintendo's Zelda for the Switch and Wii U, released on 3 March 2017 as the Switch arrived. Directed by Hidemaro Fujibayashi and produced by Eiji Aonuma, it let players go almost anywhere from the start and built its puzzles on rules for fire, water, wind and metal rather than fixed solutions. It won Game of the Year at The Game Awards 2017, has sold more than 34 million copies on the Switch, and was followed by Tears of the Kingdom in 2023.

At the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco in March 2017, days before Breath of the Wild went on sale, three of its makers showed one of their early experiments: a little top-down remake of the first Legend of Zelda, built in the new game’s engine, in which they tried out ideas such as cutting down trees for timber and setting fields on fire. Those ideas became central to the finished game. Nintendo’s designers wanted to turn a “passive” series, made of fixed sequences and exact puzzle solutions, into an “active” one, where you could, as they put it, push a boulder all the way to the final boss if you wanted to.

The result came out on 3 March 2017, on the day Nintendo launched the Switch, and on the Wii U the same day. It won Game of the Year at The Game Awards that December, and by mid-2026 Nintendo had sold more than 34 million copies on the Switch alone.

Fast facts

  • Developer: Nintendo EPD, with help from Monolith Soft, which lists the game among those it worked on under contract.
  • Director: Hidemaro Fujibayashi. Producer: Eiji Aonuma.
  • Released: 3 March 2017, for the Nintendo Switch (a launch title) and the Wii U.
  • The map: 120 shrines, four Divine Beasts and 900 Korok seeds, according to the official guide.
  • Reception: 10 out of 10 in Edge; a Metacritic score of 97 for the Switch version; Game of the Year, Best Game Direction and Best Action/Adventure Game at The Game Awards 2017.
  • Sales: 34.06 million copies on the Switch by 30 June 2026, by Nintendo’s own figures.
  • Sequel: Tears of the Kingdom (2023), directed by Fujibayashi and produced by Aonuma.

Physics and chemistry

The technical director, Takuhiro Dohta, described a “chemistry engine” alongside the physics. Physics moves things; the chemistry engine changes their state. It sorts the world into elements, such as fire, water, ice, electricity and wind, and materials, such as trees, rocks, weapons and the player. Three rules govern it: elements can change the state of materials (fire burns leaves away), elements can change each other’s state (water puts out fire), and materials cannot change each other’s state. Dohta’s team called the outcome “multiplicative gameplay”: a few simple rules that combine into results nobody had to script.

So a player can wave a leaf to blow a raft along, set grass alight, or throw a metal weapon towards enemies in a thunderstorm, because metal draws the lightning. Link can run, swim and climb almost any surface until his stamina runs out, and jump from any height with his paraglider, which turns the whole landscape into a route. Unlike earlier Zelda games, weapons and shields wear out and eventually shatter, which keeps the player picking up whatever the world offers.

Structure

Link wakes in the Shrine of Resurrection after a century asleep, with no memory, and the game starts him on the Great Plateau, raised up so that the player can look out over the land to come. After that the map is open. Activating towers fills in the map region by region. Shrines are small dungeons of puzzles or fights, 120 of them in the main game. The four Divine Beasts take the place of the series’ larger dungeons, but the story can be completed in a non-linear way, and a player can head for the final battle without freeing them. The story is told largely through memories Link recovers by visiting places from his past, because the game begins, as Wireframe put it in 2022, “with you waking from the dead a century after a certain sequence of events have concluded”.

Small things got the same attention as big ones. Wireframe gave its “Killer Feature” column in January 2019 to the sound of Link’s cooking, a few seconds of “clackety-clack” rhythm ending in a little blast of triumph, or a “non-triumphant pong” if the meal was a failure: “a whole other level of class”.

Reception

Edge gave it 10 out of 10, the third Zelda to receive the score after Ocarina of Time and Skyward Sword. On Metacritic the Switch version averages 97 from 117 critics. At The Game Awards 2017 it won Game of the Year, Best Game Direction and Best Action/Adventure Game.

Influence

Other developers said openly what they took from it. Shedworks, the two-person studio making Sable, told Wireframe in 2019 that “Breath of the Wild was the one that convinced us that the structure of our open world would work”. The same magazine noted later that year that suggestions miHoYo’s Genshin Impact looked “cheekily close to Nintendo’s Breath of the Wild” were “not without foundation”. The climbing was borrowed most often. Monster Hunter Rise let hunters climb “virtually any wall or cliff face, like Breath of the Wild”, the developer of The Gecko Gods tried out “a stamina meter like Breath of the Wild’s” before choosing something less restrictive, and the climbing in Surmount was, its designer said, “semi-lifted from the way that climbing works” in Nintendo’s game.

Later history

Tears of the Kingdom, a direct sequel set in the same Hyrule, followed on the Switch in May 2023. In June 2025 Nintendo released a Nintendo Switch 2 Edition of Breath of the Wild with higher resolution, smoother frame rates and an extra save slot, together with Zelda Notes, a companion service in the Nintendo Switch app.

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