We know that The Legend of Zelda series producer Eiji Aonuma had once played The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, comments that, once they had caught everyone’s attention, soon saw him explain that it had not influenced their work on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
In a more recent interview, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild director Hidemaro Fujibayashi and producer Eiji Aonuma have once again been asked about how they approached developing such a large game, and whether they looked to any other open-world games for inspiration.
“I don’t actually myself play a lot of other games,” Fujibayashi admitted to GameSpot. “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.”
This is where The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim comes in, a game that Nintendo had played as they explored the challenges that they would face in developing an open-world game.
“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 explained. “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.”
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is now available exclusively for Nintendo Switch and Wii U worldwide.
