Stabbing the wall and resting
Other than weapon durability, climbing/stamina seems to be the biggest beef people have with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild — and according to several members of the dev team, regaining stamina while climbing almost made it in until Miyamoto canned the concept.
Speaking to GameSpot, art director Satoru Takizawa explained the mechanic: “Until about halfway through the development, we had a spec where you could take your weapon and stab it into a wall. When your stamina gauge was dwindling you could stab the weapon and kind of hang out and rest there.” It sounds pretty rad, but it just wasn’t meant to be.
Director Hidemaro Fujibayashi notes why it was missing: “So the answer is that Mr. Miyamoto heard of the concept he said, ‘You can’t stand on the tip of a sword. This is strange.’ And then we explained, ‘No no no, you stab it in.’ Then he’s like, ‘No, it’s not going to work.’ Another idea is that it’s very hard to actually stab a sword into a big piece of rock. We considered that you can stab them into cracks or crevices in the wall, but then you can’t freely use that feature anywhere you want, so I decided not to implement it…so starting from the early stages of development we had been constantly showing Mr. Miyamoto our progress. At times we would even show him once a week what we’d been working on, because if we don’t do that, and then go face-to-face and present the idea, tables might be flipped!”
Miyamoto’s meddling is known in all corners of the world, with mixed results. Star Fox Zero allegedly suffered from it, but given how universally celebrated Breath of the Wild is, the wisdom that he imparted probably ended up bettering the game as a whole.
Zelda [GameSpot]
