Breath of the Wild, Xenoblade Chronicles and the Power of Good Ideas
If you work in the game industry you've probably heard many "ideas are cheap" variations. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Everyone has lots of ideas — it's the execution that matters. Insert your own pablum here.
In this blog I'll grapple with this idea on a conceptual level, then examine two specific examples that rebut it on a practical one: cooking in Breath of the Wild and the look-into-the-future mechanics in Xenoblade Chronicles.
"Ideas are a Dime a Dozen"
At the risk of being snide let me begin with the following: if you believe that ideas don't matter — that ideas are cheap and easy to come by and that on paper all ideas are equal — then you must also necessarily believe that this idea, the one you're currently espousing as some fundamental wisdom, is also a dime-a-dozen idea of no consequence.
Of course I grasp the intent of "ideas are cheap" rhetoric. If you visit any forum for aspiring game developers you'll inevitably run across a person who has no practical skills and is looking for a team to implement their brilliant idea, which is nearly always of the "X+Y" or "X in space" variety. But the problem with these people isn't that ideas are weak, it's that their ideas are weak — shallow and pedestrian.
Execution is what Matters?
A mediocre version of Tetris is better than the best version of Columns.
A first-year CS student could make a version of Tetris better than the best Columns. People loved the Gameboy version of Tetris, with its green and black low-res display. If ideas are cheap and execution is what matters why is any middling execution of Tetris better than the best Columns or Klax or Hatris?
At GDC2017 Nintendo showed off a 2D "NES-style" proof-of-concept of Breath of the Wild. Why bother making it? The prototype looks fun but if execution is what matters and the prototype version is wildly different in execution from the real version what's the point? They proved that this particular execution worked but then threw it out, so why bother? You could argue that the prototype helped them refine their ideas, but if ideas don't matter why bother refining them?
Is Nintendo just terrible at making games and reliant on a nonsense process?
But Don't Just Take My Word For It
This slide from Ryan Clark, taken from here, is self-explanatory and hard to argue with, so I'm not going to elaborate on it much. (Side note: I generally loathe game development business and marketing talks but Clark's are quite good) Instead I'll talk about this in a specific context: Rogue Legacy vs Full Metal Furies, both from Cellar Door Games. According to the devs Full Metal Furies is a "pretty massive failure", and while I'm not going to say that the game idea is bad it definitely seems to whiff on "has great hooks" and "will be easy to promote." The Steam trailer promises "a unique twist on action RPGs" but even after reading forum discussions and interviews with the devs I'm still not sure what that refers to.
That's in stark contrast to Rogue Legacy, which had an immediately obvious hook that helped it stand out in a sea of other Ghouls and Ghosts / Castlevania-style PC games.
Is the execution of Full Metal Furies significantly worse than Rogue Legacy? Same question but sub in Tacoma vs Gone Home or Nidhogg 2 vs Nidhogg. You'd think the followup effort would benefit from increased experience and capital after a successful previous title and thus be executed better. And in practice that seems true enough: Tacoma and Nidhogg 2 are more technically and graphically sophisticated than their predecessors.
Battle royale games are tearing up the market. Is anyone willing to claim that H1Z1, PUBG, Fortnite, Radical Heights, etc, are all finding success not because of the idea behind them but because they are well-executed? (Editors note: I began writing this quite a while ago!) According to Steamspy Radical Heights has 1 to 2 million users, and it's been in development for 5 months and has mostly temp assets. Is it better executed than Lawbreakers?
Just today I read an article about a "triple-I" publisher who described their signing strategy as looking for high-concept games that will stand out in the market. So even if you don't believe that ideas are important the people doling out money think otherwise.
Cooking In Breath of the Wild
For the bulk of this blog I'll discuss two games that illustrate the power of clever ideas. These are ideas that any competent developer could implement had they the want, not ones with high execution requirements.
First up is cooking in Breath of the Wild. I'll begin with some user reactions. First is a Twitter conversation representative of a lot of the talk about cooking as players first explored the game.
I've awkwardly cropped out the identifying details here as you weirdos can't be trusted.
In a further attempt to lend legitimacy to my opinion I also asked Kirk McKeand, games media writer and BOTW cooking fan, why it's his favorite cooking system.
Most crafting systems take place solely inside the menus. You choose the recipe you want to craft, the game automatically combines the ingredients, and you get the finished result.
In Breath of the Wild, you are always experimenting. You throw ingredients together to see what works. Things that make sense usually become the recipe you were expecting: fish and meat becomes surf and turf. It's satisfying.
Then there's the fact that it's so tactile. You hold the ingredients in your hands, throw them into a pot, and they swirl around. You hold your breath and listen to the music for a hint at how successful you've been. Then, boom, you've got some inedible slodge.
Before considering these reactions let's examine how cooking in BOTW works. The cooking has two independent layers - a purely formula-driven layer that determines food effects, and a purely arbitrary aesthetic layer that determines graphic and name.
The effect of food — how much health it restores, any additional bonuses like heat resistance or stamina — is determined by a linear formula. (More or less) In practical terms there's no difference between a bird thigh + acorn dish and a prime meat + apple dish. This formula layer has a few fun twists that nod to real cooking — some ingredients like salt have diminishing returns. (Apparently the BOTW devs are sensitive to over-salting. Personally I never put salt on anything. Take that, Gordon Ramsay) But it's very straightforward.
What food is called and what graphic is used is determined by a second unrelated layer. Here the entries are chosen in line with our understanding of cooking with no formula whatsoever: combine two vegetables and you end up with a vegetable dish, combine a fish and a vegetable and you get a fish dish. Many of these are extremely specific; Pumpkin Pie requires four set ingredients. There's no logic behind it other than our real world understanding of how certain dishes are made.
With this in mind let's look at those reactions again. The focus on recipe is something I've seen a lot on social media — people sharing recipes or advocating for a recipe book. But when you understand how the cooking works you see why a recipe book wasn't included: that book would presumably describe the aesthetic layer rather than the functional one. When the people in that tweet thread ask for the recipe what they really want to know (though they don't know they want this) is not how to create that dish, but the cooking formula and the attributes of each ingredient.
Similarly look at the middle of Kirk's quote again: "In Breath of the Wild, you are always experimenting. You throw ingredients together to see what works. Things that make sense usually become the recipe you were expecting: fish and meat becomes surf and turf." This seems to nod to both layers of the cooking systems: the aesthetic layer — that fish and meat becomes the expected surf and turf, and the formula layer — that by experimenting you can determine the the rules of the combining formula and the attributes of ingredients.
From my experience observing player reactions most players fall squarely in the middle of these two systems. They use recipes as anchor points while understanding that there's room for improvisation, very much as in real cooking; they start with a recipe and then season to taste. You find a recipe that you like that restores X hearts, then add an apple or two if you want a little more healing, or add a status-effect ingredient if you want heat resistance or stamina.
Innovation Through Formula
The practical effects of cooking in Breath of the Wild are formulaic. But when people describe it they often speak of exploration, discovery and experimentation.
In most games cooking or other crafting systems use a recipe / blueprint system. In many games you can't even create something until you officially learn the recipe in-game. And while these systems are often designed to be plausible they are rarely predictable. In Minecraft to make a ladder you build an H-shape out of wood. If you put another stick on the top row does it make a step-ladder? Can you make a metal ladder? Instead of an H why wouldn't you craft a ladder out of an H on its side — surely if you're assembling a ladder you'd assemble it laying on the ground before turning it upright.
In
