SOFT LAUNCH
Breath Of The Wild is Nintendo’s most ambitious project to date, and the company’s own staff required some assistance to get it finished. Around 100 staff from
Xenoblade Chronicles developer Monolith Soft have worked on it. Marshalling a workforce of that size is no mean feat, particularly when you’re making a game with so many variables. But ensuring everyone was on the same page was less of a problem than you might assume, as Fujibayashi explains. “Since this was a rather large-scale project, we were coming up with a lot of ideas for features and gameplay at the same time as we were creating the game,” he says. “When doing this it’s impossible to avoid some inconsistencies in terms of development decisions and what’s actually being made. So at milestones during development, we were sure to have all of the development staff take plenty of time to play the game that had been made so far and understand the problems we had.”
This might sound timeconsuming, but Fujibayashi says it became a useful shortcut, ultimately cutting down development time rather than extending it. “By repeating this process, the director just has to define the problem, and the staff working on the game can then easily understand what the issue is, avoiding any differences in key areas in terms of decisions, or the direction we should go. Also, by understanding the game as a whole by playtesting it, our developers were able to understand what the colleague next to them was working on. It’s horizontal information sharing. We overcame the boundaries of roles, which often isolates information.”
This collaborative approach allowed staff to easily exchange information with colleagues, encouraging ideas to be freely shared and implemented. “It may seem obvious, but this had quite a huge effect on the project,” Fujibayashi says. “For example, the enemies in this game really have lots of unique actions. If you throw a bomb, they may kick it or throw it back to you, or they might pick up and use weapons dropped by others. These actions were created by staff working on all kinds of other areas finding things that could be fun and bringing up those ideas.”