Climbing in video games, and how Zelda: Breath of the Wild nailed it

The climbing in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is really, really good. Video creator and game documentarian Danny O’Dwyer committed an entire video to a brief history of climbing in video games and exactly how well Zelda achieves it.

A point that really hit home for me that I never qualified with words but felt as I played was voiced perfectly in the video. It’s that bit where O’Dwyer talks about climbing in games that don’t feature a mechanic for it, where you face a slope and work out the faults in geometry and game design in order to climb a surface that maybe wasn’t designed to be climbed at all.

There’s a sense of accomplishment that comes from doing that, and it’s something that always made me feel like maybe I was getting away with something. Like I was pulling one on the devs as I figured out a way to own their playground that they never accounted for.

Climbing in Zelda is built around that ascension of geometry, and I get that same sense of accomplishment with every cliff I scale. Nintendo killed it in this game.

Article source: https://www.technobuffalo.com/2017/08/06/climbing-in-video-games-and-how-zelda-breath-of-the-wild-nailed-it/