This post was originally published on the runevision blog.
I play games to get to explore intriguing places, while challenge and story is secondary to me. But there still has to be a point to the exploration. I don’t want to just wander around some place - I want to uncover something intriguing and ideally mysterious. But the mystery lies not in the uncovering; it lies in the anticipation, or rather the lack of knowing exactly what I might find. In this article I examine that sense of mystery and wonder that’s tied not to story or themes, but to exploration. I’ll be using the word mystery as a shorthand for the kind of mystery and wonder I’m talking about here.
Zelda: Breath of the Wild from 2017 is an amazing game to go explore in, and one of my all time favorites. That said, while there are many things in the game that exude a sense of mystery - and certainly more so than in the average open world game - there are also a lot of missed opportunities.
Breath of the Wild reinvented the Zelda formula as an open world game.
I’ll compare Zelda: Breath of the Wild (BOTW) with Zelda: A Link to the Past (ALTTP) to try to figure out why ALTTP has a stronger sense of mystery than BOTW. A Link to the Past is a much older Zelda game from 1991 but I first played it in 2019.
Along the way I’ll be extracting four key design strategies for evoking a greater sense of mystery, and apply those strategies in the form of proposed design changes to BOTW. Finally, I’ll touch on some more general considerations to keep in mind when designing for a sense of mystery and wonder in general.
Mystery-mileage
While I’m critical of certain aspects of Breath of the Wild in this article, I want to highlight a few things that did give me a sense of mystery and wonder: The eerie Lost Woods, the disorienting Thyphlo Ruins, and the three deceptive enormous labyrinths found in the world. These all evoked a great sense of intrigue and not knowing what I was dealing with or what I would find. But the sense of mystery in those locations largely came from them being unique one-of-a-kind things (or three-of-a-kind in the case of the labyrinths, although they were quite different from each other).
One of the three towering labyrinths in Breath of the Wild.
While having one-of-a-kind mysteries like this is absolutely great, not everything in a large scale game can be uniquely different from everything else. It would require too many resources and not be manageable. That’s why this article focuses on strategies that make the existing variety of content in a game less predictable and more mysterious without requiring large amounts of additional variety of content. That’s the kind of strategies Breath of the Wild could have used to get better “mystery-mileage” out of its already amazing content.
Curiosities with unknown outcomes
Let’s start with the most obvious element that caused many people to feel that the world in BOTW is not as mysterious as it could have been. When you explore the vast world of Breath of the Wild, you’ll frequently come across something curious, like a circle of plants in a pond or an abstract stone sculpture with a piece missing. And initially you’ll go “huh, that’s curious” and be intrigued. Let’s investigate! You try to dive into that circle of plants in the pond or locate and add the missing piece to the stone sculpture - and a little fellow pops out of nowhere and rewards you with a Korok Seed! Oh cool!
A little puzzle in Breath of the Wild that rewards the player with a Korok Seed.
However, by the 20th time you notice something curious, you’ll probably be thinking, “ah, it’s probably just another Korok Seed”. It’s still a fun little thing to do, and the Korok Seed is useful, sure, but there’s no longer any sense of mystery about it.
To be clear, there are various small mysteries in BOTW that lead to other things than getting a Korok Seed, but those are usually related to quests that lead to an Ancient Shrine of the Blessing type. In contrast, Korok Seeds never involve a quest and always follow a set of predictable templates. It’s a many-to-one relationship: One set of curiosity types leads to Korok Seeds and a separate set of curiosity types leads to shrines.
Not knowing what you get
How does this compare to A Link to the Past? The closest analog in ALTTP might be the optional heart pieces, since they are also often hidden behind a little curiosity or mystery.
Compared to the Korok seeds, though, the heart pieces in ALTTP are more strongly related to exploring nooks and crannies in the world. Sometimes you can see one in advance out of reach and the puzzle is figuring out how to reach it. Other times they just reward exploration but couldn’t have been known in advance.
Pieces of Heart are hidden away in many novel ways in A Link to the Past.
Sometimes they’re inside a chest, but chests can contain other things than heart pieces too. Similarly, reaching the heart pieces sometimes involves blowing a hole in a cracked wall with a bomb. But cracked walls can also lead to other things than heart pieces, so you won’t know what you’ll find. It’s a many-to-many relationship: Each of the curiosities that might lead to a heart piece (a chest, a cracked wall, etc) might also lead to another outcome.
The fact that the curiosities or puzzles that lead to heart pieces don’t follow specific templates that are only used for heart pieces means that finding heart pieces in ALTTP doesn’t feel formulaic and predictable in the same way that finding Korok Seeds does in BOTW. And this uncertainty and unpredictability about what to expect contributes to a sense of mystery.
The many-to-many relationship
What have we learned in this comparison between the curiosities in BOTW and in ALTTP?
A question we can ask to determine if we are not getting the best mystery-mileage out of curiosities in the world is:
When the player sees something curious in the world, can they predict in advance what they’ll get out of it?
And a strategy we can make use of to decrease predictability of the outcome is:
Have a many-to-many relationship between the types of curiosities in the world and the types of outcomes.
Perhaps it can sound like unknown outcomes is about randomness, and that it’s the same principle that makes slot machines and loot boxes addicting but not intrinsically engaging. But unknown is not the same as random. When you explore a world and learn of an outcome of a given curiosity located at a specific location, this knowledge might be relevant later in the game, or if replaying the game. It’s a fact you’ve learned that’s tied to the experience of exploring the world. Loot boxes, in contrast, are not tied to a location in the world and the outcome can’t be learned. As such they’re not tied to exploration but are detached random events.
Now let’s try to apply the strategy above to curiosities in Breath of the Wild. Perhaps some of the “Korok” style puzzles shouldn’t always lead to Korok Seeds. Sometimes they could lead to, say, an entrance to some area opening, a treasure chest being revealed, or it could mark the beginning of a new side-quest. Then you wouldn’t know in advance what you’d get or even it’s degree of significance. The relationship between curiosity and outcome would have been changed from a many-to-one relationship to a many-to-many relationship.
Ambiguous classification of spaces
In the last section we looked at how to make it harder to predict what you’re going to get. In this section we’ll be looking into how to make it harder to form an idea of what something even is. We’ll explore ambiguous classification starting with a comparison of the Ancient Shrines in BOTW with the dungeons in ALTTP.
Ancient Shrines and Dungeons
The entrance to a shrine in BOTW always uses (nearly) the same model. So you know exactly what a shrine looks like.
An Ancient Shrine in Breath of the Wild. They all look like this.
When you enter, you descend a long tube elevator down into an often enormous space. The kind of challenge found there varies greatly (sometimes there’s no challenge at all, if the challenge was reaching the shrine entrance in the first place), but invariably you will reach a platform at the end with a treasure chest and a monk who grants you a Spirit Orb that can be used to increase health or stamina. Then there’s a cut, and you’re back at the Shrine entrance in the world above.
Dungeons in ALTTP are not an exact analog to Shrines in BOTW. The dungeons play a more central role since they give you new abilities, they end with boss fights, and beating them is required. Still, they’re close enough for our comparison.
Entrances to dungeons in ALTTP don’t have a specific look; they are each unique.
Various entrances in A Link to the Past. Can you tell which of them lead to dungeons?
Some of the images above depict entrances to dungeons while some of them depict other entrances that are not to dungeons. Can you tell which is which? I actually can’t remember this myself despite having played the game just a few years ago.
I can’t overstate what this does for the sense of mystery when exploring this world. Instead of seeing “there’s a dungeon”, “there’s an X”, “there’s a Y” etc. I just see mysterious entrances. Who knows what’s inside? Compare this to BOTW where you always know when an entrance is an Ancient Shrine because all shrines look the same.
Now, I know that some dungeons in ALTTP get explicitly marked on the world map, but that doesn’t counteract the sense of mystery entirely.
What even is a dungeon?
Now, if this was only about the entrances, we could say this is another example of a many-to-many relationship where you don’t know what the outcome is in advance when you see an entrance.
But in ALTTP the mystery doesn't stop when you've entered an entrance because even once inside, it's still not entirely clear what kind of space you've entered. Is it a dungeon or not? And if it is, what does that mean exactly?
For what is a dungeon? There's forum discussions online where people discuss how many dungeons ALTTP has, and people reach different numbers depending on which criteria they use. Is it the spaces where you get a new ability? The ones that end with a boss? The ones that are mapped out with a dungeon map? And does the castle that you clear one part of, and then later in the game return to clear another part of, count as one or two dungeons?
