Ever since it launched, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has been a hot topic of conversation in the gaming community. The game is huge, so there's plenty to talk about when it comes to the title itself. However, one thing has permeated gaming conversation when it comes to Breath of the Wild in a way that seems to bother some and excite others: The common comparison between The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and countless other titles.

It seems like nowadays, games are frequently getting Breath of the Wild comparisons when they're revealed: Some potentially intentional, and others purely by coincidence. Either way, the sheer number of comparisons to the game has made plenty of people ask why it's become such a common point of video game discussion. With the currently untitled Breath of the Wild sequel sitting expectantly on the horizon, there's likely to be another resurgence of comparisons made to the series, so it's important to understand why Breath of the Wild is such a major point of comparison in the industry before a new entry releases.

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What Sets Breath of the Wild Apart

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After its release and instant popularity, a lot of studios were likely looking at what Breath of the Wild did right to cause such a surge in popularity for a franchise that's been around for over 30 years. While there have been plenty of games that have tried their hand at capturing the same magic, it feels as if every title that's attempted to follow in Zelda's footsteps has come short in one way or another.

It's simple to look at the game and deduce that a truly open-world Zelda game is what fans had been wanting. The shift in focus towards the open world was what made the game popular, but that's not the full picture. Simply being an open world isn't what makes Breath of the Wild special: It's the way that the game revamped just about everything in the Zelda series from its dungeons to its story to its minute-to-minute gameplay, and centered all of those changes around player freedom in an open world. Each of those individual changes are fun and work on their own, sure, but it's the collective experience that makes Breath of the Wild such a success.

Following The Breath of the Wild Format

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Because of its major popularity, it seemed like only a matter of time until Breath of the Wild made a true influence on the gaming space and it can be seen in all corners of it now. From Halo Infinite to Sonic Frontiers, it seems like game trailers simply can't get enough of the main character walking towards a cliff and overlooking the vast and luscious world below.

This isn't something that Breath of the Wild invented, but that final moment in the original trailers for the game signified everything that was going to be different about the series moving forward. Looking out over a vast world shows the seemingly endless possibilities in store for the protagonist and a feeling of wonder and excitement, two feelings essential for selling games.

That's not to say that all games taking influence from Breath of the Wild only see it as a title to follow behind in hopes of grabbing some easy cash, far from it. However, those feelings are exactly the kinds of things that studios want fans of their legacy franchises to feel when playing a new entry. For example, it seems like a safe thing to say that if Halo Infinite were simply a standard Halo entry, and not attempting to shake up the franchise in a similar way to how Zelda did, it may not have seen the sweeping success that it's seen since its release.

However, copying Breath of the Wild's approach to design by taking a franchise and making it open world isn't always enough to ensure success. After all, as stated above, Breath of the Wild is much more than its open-world which is why studios that seem to be pivoting towards an open world because Breath of the Wild did it haven't always seen the success that they might have been hoping for. 2022 is full of games that seem to be taking inspiration from Zelda in one way or another and that's a great thing, but it's still to be seen if that's the way that titles are going to be successful.

Pokemon Legends: Arceus, for example, seems to be taking a lot of inspiration from the game, but making a Breath of the Wild-style Pokemon game might not be exactly what the series needs to feel fresh and new. The mechanics worked for Zelda because they were derivative of the gameplay that the series has always had so doing a one-to-one version of that for Pokemon, a series with drastically different mechanics, might not be the best move to make a quality Pokemon title.

At the end of the day, because of how great Breath of the Wild is, there were bound to be plenty of games following it that take inspiration from it. However, not every open-world title is necessarily "like Breath of the Wild" simply because of the open world.

Games like Halo Infinite and Super Mario Odyssey have a Breath of the Wild air to them because of the way they reinvent their respective franchises by following Zelda's lead, boiling these franchises down to their mechanical foundations and what makes them fun. That's the kind of game design that sees success when dealing with a long-term franchise, simply doing everything that Breath of the Wild did because the game was popular is not.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is available now for Nintendo Switch.

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