Happy Friday!
I’ll be talking about Breath of the Wild more over the weekend, but today I waned to hone in on a small facet of open-world design: viewpoints. These were popularized by Assassins Creed (though a lot of the way AC handles verticality, scale, and set base-points in the landscape draws inspiration from Shadow of the Colossus). Having hit a stride with 2009’s AC2, Ubisoft relentlessly pursued this particular style of open-world design, with huge maps, clearly defined geographical subregions, and high-up vantage points within each one that a player could climb in order to unlock most of that region’s map-data. One could say that this formula, whatever its original merits were, was ‘done to death’ or at least done excessively, appearing in a dozen AC titles, quite a few Far Cry titles, and elsewhere (Spider-man, Watch Dogs, etc - play enough open world games and it can seem ubiquitous).
What I liked about it in some of the early Assassins Creed games was the natural fit between a vantage point as a “real” thing (a real way to understand your surroundings) and game progression. So, the player surveys their surroundings in an authentic, non-game-fied way. I’m high up, I can see. The game then connects that moment to specific rewards in terms of information, convenience, and access. I would also praise the early AC titles for making viewpoints small challenges of their own. Climbing them was not trivial, but involved scrutiny of space, routing, decision-making, etc. There again, players benefited from a nice sense of ‘fit,’ with climbing being a signature part of the protagonist’s identity and moveset (what makes them an Assassin, what makes this experience remarkable), and viewpoints serving as points of culmination as you explored.
All that said, I think most of us grew wary of region-based design where individual viewpoints expanded your map data, quest data, fast travel, and so on. In the case of Assassins Creed, part of this is that the climbing part of the game quickly became trivial past the third or fourth iteration. You had almost nothing to ‘tackle’ in scaling a tall structure - just hold forward. And part of it was the stark contrast between being ‘in the dark’ and then having a wealth of information and access rain down on you with each new viewpoint. Being ‘off the grid’ felt too forced, like you were too limited in what you could do or achieve or explore or mess around with - any foray into uncharted territory meant an autopilot beeline for a viewpoint before you could continue. So, counter-intuitively, rather than feeling like a reward or a natural fit, in some later AC and FC titles (and others), viewpoints began to feel like the player would suspend the game, would stop playing, and then resume after completing a mindless chore. I’m framing this in stark terms for clarity - in practice the quality and feeling of sustained immersion varied by degrees, case by case. But I’m right about the general design drift - a novel and smart idea becoming a crutch. If we learned anything from ‘viewpoints’ in open world games from 2007 to 2017, it’s that you can take something intentional and calibrated and then aggressively recycle it into some zombie version of itself.
You could always try to argue that the thing itself isn’t getting worse, but that people are tiring of it. But the flipside to that is that people are tiring of it because, as a design element, it becomes deployed automatically, cynically, etc.
Which brings me to Breath of the Wild.
Did this game ‘need’ viewpoints, or as it calls them, Shiekah Towers? This is a tough question because it potentially sidetracks us onto Zelda’s genre-identity. That’s probably a topic for another day. But for the moment, I think we can say that there’s a “Wise Old Man Coming Down from the Mountain” quality to Breath of the Wild. It’s like Nintendo saying, “if it has to be this way, we’ll show you how its done.” Which, if you think about it, is almost paradoxical. On the one hand, Nintendo embraced open-world design extraordinarily late in the broader industry context. That makes it feel as if their hand was eventually forced. But on the other hand, almost nobody else could be ‘roped in’ and offer such an absurdly ambitious, polished, sophisticated, thoughtful and complete take. My impressions of Breath of the Wild continue to take shape and there’s a long way to go. But it’s obvious that the worst the game could be, in the end, is “very good.”
So we have this incredibly late arrival to the genre, going way outside of Zelda norms, that rather bravely interpolates the landscape with huge glowing pillars. They’re not shy about what they’re doing. Maybe, you could argue that a significant percentage of the thriving Zelda fanbase isn’t/wasn’t experiencing general burnout on over-used features in open-world game design - that Nintendo is mastering and recasting a certain form (here, viewpoints) and bringing it to an audience that is largely unfamiliar. That they’re doing this strategically and that they’re backed by market research. But viewpoints were so prevalent, for so long, in so many mass-audience blockbusters… I have to believe that a majority of fans recognized what they were looking at instantly. That’s a risk. Not because Nintendo is conducting itself cynically, but because it’s willing to associate itself with those who are, and then try to wrest control of a player’s subjective reaction, to reset players’ sense of what is possible, what is exciting, what has layers, what has depth.
If we go along, immersing ourselves in Hyrule and crowding out prior associations, we can observe a number of critical, intentional, and savvy things. First, ask yourself: can you play, enjoy, explore and meaningfully engage with the world in BotW when you’re “off-grid.” Yes, you absolutely can. Climbing a Shiekah tower helps move a player over a line from study to mastery, from upstream to downstream, from wilderness to backyard. But you absolutely do not ‘need’ them and do not chafe under an enforced blindness when you have neither located or ascended one. Second, when you do ‘sync’ with a tower, you are not flooded with map clutter and junk quests, not handed a checklist. There’s a degree of restraint, a continued respect for the player, a determination to stay out of your way. As in the very first Zelda: your quest, not theirs. Third, climbing towers is never trivial, and also never quite the same. There’s variation in routing and approach, obstacles to surmount, small puzzles to solve, resources to manage - all without being ‘one right answer’ gameplay. One of the early mistakes as Assassins Creed evolved was to treat convenience as the highest standard shaping the experience. Most Shiekah Towers in Breath of the Wild, certainly outside of the initial region, involve effort. That’s why they’re fun! You could extend this to climbing in the game as a whole - players feel like they can “do anything” but that they apply effort and scrutiny to achieve goals as they emerge.
The towers also fit and enhance the sheer scale of the world. Link traverses the map with several modes and speeds of travel, and one of these involves leveraging the game’s verticality - identifying high points and paragliding in sequences that you route on the fly. Towers and high points generally give you a third gear (on foot would be first, mounted second, paragliding third, limited fast-travel fourth). These modes are authentic to the world - they’re empowering, yes, but can’t be reduced to “go anywhere instantly.”
We should also say: it’s not like Nintendo doesn’t understand map data in games. Syncing your first tower feels eerily similar to finding your first map-computer in 1994’s Super Metroid. If you think about Breath of the Wild’s towers in light of the alternatives, the other options aren’t great. You could have the map fill out as you go… but it’s far too large for that, and would either require the map to fill out in a huge radius around Link (making it seem like you’d visited places you hadn’t), or every player’s map would have all this fog-noise criss-crossed by the paths you’d taken. You could just have the map completely filled in from the start, and add specific mini-icons to mark your discovery (essentially, the Skyrim approach). But that requires you to drop endless ‘pins’ onto the map, which I think is less than ideal, and also hurts the sense that this is a completely unknown, post-Calamity landscape for Link to explore and understand.
Whether The Legend of Zelda, as a series, “needed” to be re-conceptualized from the ground up, needed to step away from what was very much its own genre and ‘flex’ on what is very much the biggest genre-trend of the century - I suppose that’s a more subjective and philosophical question. But they did it, and it’s remarkable that they wrestled viewpoints out of their stagnant, zombified context and deployed them with what appear to be near-perfect design instincts.
There’s a part of me that can’t help but roll my eyes when I ‘sync’ a viewpoint (or equivalent) in a AAA openworld game. But that’s the fault of those games. I’ll have a bit more trust diving into The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.