I’ve loved plenty of triple-A games over the past five years, but few have introduced major innovations to the medium.The Outer Worldsis a great game, but it’s a riff on decades of first-person RPGs likeVampire: The Masquerade - BloodlinesandFallout: New Vegas.The Last of Us Part 2is a personal favorite, andisstructurally daring, but it basically plays like a refined version of the first game.Baldur’s Gate 3might be the best RPG of all time, but that’s because it represents the ultimate fusion of isometric freedom with big-budget production values.
These games are all fantastic, but the majority of triple-A games are too expensive and take too long to make to really get weird mechanically. When these games do innovate, it tends to be in smaller ways.Red Dead Redemption 2offered a fresh idea with its greet/interaction button, and CD Projekt Red imbuedCyberpunk 2077with an immersive sense of time by making you wait until you received a phone call before you could start a new main quest mission. But neither game was built around this idea. Both would be, by and large, the same game with these mechanics removed, and that is typical of innovation in triple-A.
Zelda Pushes Boundaries By Building On What Came Before
The Legend of Zeldais the exception to this strict rule. With the most recent four game run — A Link Between Worlds,Breath of the Wild,Tears of the Kingdom, andEchoes of Wisdom— Nintendo has shown that a marquee series can still be experimental and blaze a new trail. As I’ve argued recently, these are the rare big-budget games that still get sold to audiences on the strength of their mechanics. In the run-up to the release of all of these games, Nintendo opted to shine a spotlight on the ways that players would interact with their worlds. They can do this because, unlike most triple-A games, this series is interested in offering innovative ways to play.
Innovation isn’t necessarily about inventing ideas from whole cloth. Instead, a game is innovative when it finds fresh ways to combine the old with the new. Breath of the Wild, which broke new ground for Zelda and open-world games as a whole, felt wildly different for a Zelda game.
But it did so by taking ingredients from survival games and Dark Souls and throwing them in a stew with traditional Zelda gameplay and iconography. It made choices that many open-world games since have followed, like its glider and the ability to climb everything. But neither of those ideas were entirely original, either. Innovation is often the result of many choices coming together to produce something new, rather than bolt-from-the-blue ideas that no one has tried before.
Breath of the Wild’s ‘innovative’ stamina wheel originated in 2011’sSkyward Sword.
Innovation Doesn’t Mean Inventing Something Entirely New
To that point, one of the key ideas heralded as innovative in Breath of the Wild first entered the series through A Link Between Worlds. The 2013 3DS game gave players the ability to tackle dungeons in any order. Other games have picked up on that since A Link Between Worlds (like 2016’s Hyper Light Drifter) and, especially, since Breath of the Wild, as Immortals Fenyx Rising, A Short Hike, Sable, and Sam Barlow’s Telling Lies and Immortality (among many others) played around with freeform design.
Echoes of Wisdom is fascinating because it’s doing things that feel entirely new, but only in the context of a2DZelda game. Massively systemic Zelda is seven years old at this point, but this is the first time we’ve seen the BOTW/TOTK ethos applied to a top-down entry. It feels exhilarating to spawn a bunch of items and use them in creative ways. It’s genuinely innovative, but only because Nintendo decided to see how far it could take the ideas of Breath of the Wild.
Despite iteration having a reputation for leading to same-yFar CryandAssassin’s Creedentries, it’s key to the exciting innovation on display in Zelda. Echoes of Wisdom feels fresh, but only because Nintendo is building on what it learned all the way back in 2013.
