Thoughts on UX of Zelda: Breath of The Wild
I’ve been completely sucked into The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild since I got it last month. I’d say this is the best open world game as well as Zelda title I’ve ever played. I enjoy the considerable latitude in BotW that allows me to explore such a beautiful Hyrule.
After playing BtoW for a month, I’ve noticed that there’s room for improvement.
Inventory Menu Nav
Why is Inventory important
The inventory should be a place where players spend most of the time other than the gameplay, so the usability of it plays a key role.
How Inventory works
First of all, let’s take a quick look at the structure of the inventory menu.
The inventory menu is based on the grid system which is good, clean and utilitarian.
There are seven tabs under Inventory, each one, by default, has one page (twenty slots). Players can quickly navigate through them by flicking the right analog, and select items by moving the left analog. It works very well within the first few hours of the gameplay.
However, as the game progresses, some tabs will expand the capacity, for instance, Materials tab will be expanded up to five pages, and Food tab will be able to house up to four pages.
Now if you are under a tab with multiple pages, flicking the right analog will turn a page instead of jump to an adjacent tab.
Problems
Having more slots is definitely important for such a “survival game”, but it brings along a new problem: the efficiency of switching tabs. Below is the heat map of the inventory tabs in my experience with the game so far, from greatest to least.
Materials > Armor > Food > *Weapons > Bows and Arrows > Shields > Key items
*Technically I interact with Weapons the most, but I place it fourth thanks to the quick menu for accessing different weapons.
I’ve spent most of the time jumping between Materials, Armor, and Food tabs which are twelve pages. It’s very inconvenient to jump between them. For example, imagine you were on the last page of Food, and you wanted to go to the first page of Armor. You’d need to flick the right analog eleven times. This is really the most frustrating thing when I’m using the inventory. So I always end up holding the right analog an going all the way to the far left/right, then readjusting back to the right tab.
So how might we improve the usability of the inventory menu?
- Separate the interaction of changing pages and changing tabs. But this approach will definitely add more complexity and break the purity of left & right interaction.
- Rethink the hold interaction. As I mentioned before, holding the analog will flip pages faster. However it’s not very easy to use, I always go too far. I think the potential solution could be to redesign the way hold interaction works — Holding the right analog will snap to a tab one by one until releasing the analog. By doing so, players can either flip a page or locate a specific tab through the right analog efficiently.
Full inventory use case
The full inventory notification is the most frustrating thing that I’ve been running into every time I play BotW. It interrupts the flow badly.
In BotW, because of the weapons durability system, players tend to collect and manage equipment frequently. However, the system doesn’t provide a smart way for us to do so.
How it works now
When Link walks over a chest or a dropped weapon with fully loaded weapon slots, the prompt still shows “Take”. However, when you hit A, it tells you that you run out of room, and nothing more. To get around this, players need to open up the menu, go to weapons tab, and drop items you don’t want, then return to gameplay, pick up the weapon again. This is a clunky experience.
Potential solutions
The simplest way to fix this problem would be to have a better contextual prompt. When you don’t have space, show “Swap” instead of “Take”, after that the system could either reuse the quick weapons horizontal menu or conjure up an overlay weapon inventory menu (like the one you will see when you upgrade your armor at Great Fairy Fountain).
In the wild, carrying enough food will keep you alive. So when I get a chance to cook, I’ll fill up every food slot.
How it works now
Go near a pot → Bring up the inventory and navigate to Materials tab → Select stuff → Return to gameplay → Press A to cook.
Problems
The problem comes in when you are out of space. You won’t know it until you finally hit the cook button. A good experience should let you know it upfront.
Potential solutions
- Initiate cooking when Link is near a pot, so when running out of space, players will get prompted before diving into Materials tab. The downside is that it kind of breaks the freedom that BotW empowers us. Grabbing stuff then doing something applies to many use cases in the game, such as feeding a dog, baking an apple, deploying a bomb, etc. Singling out cooking to tackle a small issue doesn’t seem to be a good idea.
- Tell players that food slots are full. When Link finishes cooking food, present a prompt after the food popup. This approach doesn’t require much design effort but would work well in this case.
Shortcuts to Quickly Changing Armor Set
I always change my armor set because different sets give me different buff, such as stealth set at night, Zora set while swimming, climbing set while conquering cliffs, etc. So a shortcut to quickly swapping armor set would be awesome.
The simplest solution would be to have an option for equipping an armor set.
Conclusion
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has perfectly interpreted what an open world should feel like, and I’m so excited to hear that the producer, Eiji Aonuma, has confirmed a new Zelda game is in production. Thank you Nintendo!
