Case Study 14.1: Breath of the Wild — The Curiosity Machine

In March 2017, Nintendo released The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild alongside the Switch. The game had been in development for nearly six years. It was directed by Hidemaro Fujibayashi, with Eiji Aonuma producing. It was the first mainline Zelda game built around a single, fully open world rather than a hub-and-spoke dungeon structure. And it became, for many designers, the reference text for open-world curiosity design — the game that other games are now compared against.

Understanding why is useful even if you will never make a Zelda game. The principles Breath of the Wild operationalized are general. They apply to any 3D world in which you want the player to choose to keep moving.

The Triangle Rule

Fujibayashi has spoken publicly, in GDC talks and interviews, about a principle he and his team called the triangle rule. The principle is geometric. When you are designing terrain, rather than smoothing it into rolling hills, place triangular obstructions — mountains, hills, rock formations — between the player and the things the player can see. As the player moves around the triangle, the things on the other side become visible, hidden, and visible again, depending on their angle of approach.

This sounds technical, but its purpose is curiosity. A flat field with a tower at the far end gives the player one piece of information: there is a tower, and they will walk to it. A field with a triangle of mountain in the middle, partially hiding the tower, gives the player a changing piece of information: as they walk, the tower disappears and reappears, sometimes flanked by other landmarks they had not seen, sometimes partially obscured by terrain they had not noticed. Each step yields slightly different visual information. The world feels denser, even though the underlying content is the same.

The triangle rule also creates occlusion-based curiosity. The player sees a landmark. They start walking. The landmark vanishes behind a hill. They continue, expecting it to reappear. When it does, it reappears from a new angle, with new context (perhaps a smaller landmark next to it that they had not previously seen). The hill did not block their progress; it shaped their progress, turning a straight walk into a sequence of small revelations.

Almost every region in Breath of the Wild has this triangular topography. The Great Plateau (the tutorial area) is a triangle. The route from Hateno to Lurelin Village is a sequence of triangles. The approach to Hyrule Castle is a triangle of mountains, ruined buildings, and water. The triangles are not random; they are placed to ensure that any straight-line path the player attempts becomes a curving path of partial revelations.

The Sheikah Towers

The most famous design element in Breath of the Wild is the Sheikah Tower. There are fifteen of them, one in each of the game's regions. Each tower is hundreds of meters tall, with a glowing tip that pulses in a distinctive rhythm, visible from miles away. From any high point in the world — which is to say, from many places — at least one tower is visible.

The towers serve several functions simultaneously, which is part of why they are so admired:

• Map unlock. Climbing a tower fills in the regional map.
• Vista. From the top, the player can see far, often much further than they could from the highest natural point in the region.
• Landmark. The towers are visible from anywhere, providing constant orientation.
• Curiosity engine. A tower visible in the distance is an objective the game has not assigned but the player decides to pursue.

The fourth function is the deepest. When the player climbs to the top of a tower and surveys the region, they see more towers in the distance — some closer, some farther — along with mountains, structures, oddities, glints of light. The vista from a tower is itself a sightline composition: dozens of partial information gaps, all visible at once, each one a candidate for the player's next several hours.

The game does not tell the player which tower to visit next. It does not even reliably tell them what each tower controls. The player is left to choose. Critically, this choice is informed — they can see what is in each direction — but open — no direction is correct. This is open-world freedom done in a way that does not feel paralyzing. The freedom is paired with information. The player chooses because they can see; they do not choose blindly.

"See a Thing → Go to the Thing"

Internal to the Breath of the Wild team, there was a mantra that has been quoted in interviews: see a thing, go to the thing. The mantra was a quality test for the world. If the player could look in any direction and see something they wanted to investigate, the world was working. If they could look in a direction and see nothing of interest, that area needed more.

The implementation of this mantra is visible in the world's density of points of interest. Breath of the Wild contains:

• 120 shrines (small puzzle dungeons scattered across the map).
• 900 koroks (tiny hidden puzzles — usually a circle of stones with one missing, a rock with a strange thing under it, etc.).
• 76 side quests.
• 31 shrine quests.
• Dozens of stables, towns, villages, camps, ruins, lakes, mountains, and other notable features.
• Hundreds of unmarked points of interest — interesting rock formations, isolated trees, abandoned structures.

This is a lot of content. But content alone does not produce the Breath of the Wild feeling. The feeling comes from the placement. Every one of these points of interest is positioned so that the player will see it, organically, while doing something else. The shrine on the hill across the valley is visible from the road. The korok puzzle in the middle of the woods is along a path the player will probably walk. The stable in the distance is visible from the previous stable.

The result is that the player is almost never moving through empty space. They are always seeing at least one thing they want to investigate, and as they investigate one thing, they pass another, which they then investigate. The "see a thing, go to the thing" loop runs continuously, sometimes for hours, and the player loses track of the original direction they were heading because every direction has been pulling them.

The Anti-Quest-Marker Stance

Breath of the Wild is famous for its restrained use of quest markers. Most quests do not have an arrow on the screen pointing at the objective. Instead, the quest description gives a verbal hint — "Go to the village in the eastern desert" — and the player must figure out which village, and where in the desert.

This decision was contentious during development, and it remains contentious among players. Many players complain that they got lost. But the design choice is doing important work: it is restoring the information gap that quest markers normally close.

Consider what happens with a standard quest marker. The game tells you what to do. It puts an arrow on the screen pointing at where to go. You follow the arrow. You arrive. You do the thing. The arrow moves to the next objective. You follow the arrow.

In this loop, no information gap exists at any point. The player is told what to do and where to go; they do it. There is no question to wonder about, no exploration needed, no decision to make. The world becomes a series of way-points strung together by movement.

In Breath of the Wild, by contrast, the quest description creates a gap: which village in the eastern desert? The player must look, must wander, must check. They will miss the right village the first time. They will see other things. They will get distracted. They will find it eventually, after having seen four other interesting locations they did not know existed.

This design trades efficiency for richness. The player completes fewer quests per hour. But each quest contains hours of incidental discovery, and the world becomes a place the player knows rather than a list of way-points they have visited.

The principle: when you place a quest marker, you are removing a curiosity opportunity. Every quest marker you do not place is a small bet on the player's curiosity. Most modern open-world games have lost this bet so many times that they no longer make it. Breath of the Wild makes the bet constantly.

Fujibayashi's Design Philosophy

Hidemaro Fujibayashi has, in interviews and talks, articulated a philosophy that informed Breath of the Wild's design. Several themes recur:

The world should be fun to be in. Not just fun to do things in, but fun to exist in. The reason the game has dynamic weather, a wide range of visual environments, and detailed terrain is not just immersion. It is to make every movement through the world have texture. Walking from one place to another in Breath of the Wild is not dead time between objectives; it is a continuous low-grade pleasure of seeing and reacting to the world.

Multiplication, not addition. Fujibayashi has spoken about wanting players to combine systems in unexpected ways. A wooden weapon plus a fire arrow equals a flaming sword. A metal box plus a thunderstorm equals a lightning bait. The game systems multiply rather than add: each system gains depth through interaction with other systems. This applies to exploration too. A glider plus a Sheikah Tower equals a long descent into territory you have never seen. Each system adds to every other system's curiosity output.

Trust the player. The team has been explicit that they wanted to make a game that respected the player's autonomy. They did not want to lead the player by the hand. They wanted to give the player a world and trust them to explore it. The famous quote: "The greatest reward we can give the player is to be surprised."

Subtraction over addition. Fujibayashi has noted that the team frequently removed mechanics that the player did not need, to keep the focus on exploration. Earlier Zelda games had complex inventory systems, fairy companions, helper characters that explained things. Breath of the Wild has very few of these. The game is, in many ways, more minimal than its predecessors, which paradoxically allows it to feel larger.

What the Curiosity Machine Does Not Do

It is worth noting what Breath of the Wild does not attempt, because the absence is part of the design.

It does not have a strong, linear story that the player must follow. The story exists, but the player can ignore most of it indefinitely.

It does not have major cutscenes that interrupt exploration. The cinematic moments are short and infrequent.

It does not have a difficult character progression system. Link gets a few stamina and heart upgrades; that is the bulk of it. There are no skill trees, no multi-axis builds, no gear scaling.

It does not have detailed friendship or companion mechanics. There are characters in the world, but they are atmospheric, not central.

These absences are not failures of design. They are deliberate. The game's curiosity engine works because it is not competing with other engines. There is no "main story progression" pulling the player along a different axis. There is no "build optimization" pulling the player toward grindy farming. There is exploration, and almost everything in the game is in service of exploration.

This is a design lesson about focus. Breath of the Wild is a curiosity machine because it sacrificed other things to be one. A game that tries to be a curiosity machine and a deep narrative and a complex RPG and a competitive PvP arena will likely be none of those things very well. The principle is general: pick what your game is most about, and let other systems serve it rather than compete with it.

What to Take Away

For a designer studying this case, the takeaways are not "add a tower system to your game." The takeaways are deeper:

1. Compose your terrain to occlude. Triangles produce more curiosity than flat fields. The same content, hidden and revealed by terrain, feels denser than content all visible at once.

2. Use vistas as both reward and seed. A high vantage is a payoff for climbing and a launchpad for the next ten exploration decisions.

3. Place every point of interest where the player will see it from elsewhere. Content that is not visible from anywhere is hidden content, which is fine for secrets but bad for general points of interest.

4. Resist the quest marker reflex. Every objective you mark with an arrow is an exploration opportunity you have removed. Mark sparingly; trust the player more often.

5. Subtract competing systems. If exploration is your central activity, do not let other systems pull the player away from exploring. Make exploration the path through which the player engages with everything else.

6. Believe in surprise as the highest reward. Breath of the Wild's most iconic moments are not its set-pieces. They are the moments when the player accidentally discovered something the game never told them about. Those moments are designed; the design is just well-hidden.

The curiosity machine is not a trick. It is a discipline of placing things, occluding things, and then trusting the player to find them. Breath of the Wild shows what that discipline can produce when applied at the scale of an entire game world. The lesson generalizes downward: even a single room can be a curiosity machine, if you compose it with the same attention.