Sunday, February 12, 2017

Breath of the Wild: Possible Mounts

It's been a month now that the Switch Presentation trailer of Breath of the Wild has been released and you can still look at the thing and analyze all the details. It really gave away a lot of potential, where some of it lies in the possibility of having other mounts than just horses.

(Up front: I want to apologize, if anything new about this already has been revealed. I'm not up to date anymore with the media and I drew the line with the latest trailer. But this is still a topic, where I wanted to talk about it, before the game arrives.)

In the trailer we saw Link next to the Gerudo girl, where both arrived at the "Camel Guardian dungeon", but not on horses, but what appears to be some hairy walruses:


Potentially there are different mounts based on a regional aspect. It could be like in Twilight Princess, where you can't bring your horse to the desert, but you can mount the wild boars used by Bokoblins in the area. Depending on where you leave the Great Plateau, you might not have access to any horses, but different ridable species, like the walruses.

When replaying the Wind Waker I enjoyed a lot, how quick and fun it is to ride the boat with the new Swift Sail speed. The rafting that showcased with Breath of the Wild so far on the other hand was utterly slow and terribly inconvenient, so it would be nice to have some water mount, which lets you speed quickly across any ocean areas in the game. And for Death Mountain you might get something that lets you climb rock walls, for example a gecko creature. And ultimately you might be able to use some kind of Loftwing later in the game, which lets you fly over the entire world.

This might even tie in with the new buddy system, where it seems like there will be various characters which will follow and support Link throughout the game, from different races. Next to Princess Zelda and the Gerudo Girl, there are warriors from the Goron, Zora and Rito tribes to support you. And it seems like these characters are using their own mounts, so that they are able to follow you around everywhere. Maybe for each race there will be a different mount. Link and Zelda will simply go on horses and the Gerudo travel on the walruses. Maybe the Zora will offer some water mount to cross the sea and maybe the Rito will give you access to some Loftwing replacement (they wouldn't need it themselves, though). And of course the Gorons could have their own mounts as well.

This reminds me of my Pre Hyrule Warriors Zelda battle game idea, where every character also would have had their own mount. With that I always imagined Darmani or Darunia going around on a Dodongo-like creature similar to Dimitri:



I suppose that the Gorons will have something that lets you climb rock walls, but the Dodongos from Twilight Princess actually looked like geckos and even were able to walk on ceilings, so it's still a possibility that we can have both.

You can still compare it a little bit with the Oracle games, where you did have different mounts with different skills available. The difference is that you won't have to make a choice for the entire game, where one region gets essentially replaced based on your choice (see here). Instead the regions now will determine the available mounts, where you might even have different types of stables for them. So, in Hyrule you get the horse stables, which we've already seen, while in the Gerudo Deserts you might find "Walrus tents", which look very different, but work in the same fashion.

Breath of the Wild will have a huge world and maybe there will also be many different means of traveling through this world other than what we've seen already. There's quite some potential here and in three weeks we will see, how Nintendo made use of it.

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