In the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the game features a very large emphasis on the player’s ability to climb to reach various areas in the world. By doing this, the stamina gauge is inevitably depleted.
However, in a recent GameSpot interview, it seems that, at some point during the development process, the devs wanted to implement a way to regain stamina by having Link stab the wall he was climbing and be able to hang and rest there for a moment. This idea was ultimately abandoned because of Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto disagreement with how the idea would work.
Speaking of the cut idea, Breath of the Wild’s art director Satoru Takizawa had this to say:
“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.”
The game’s director Hidemaro Fujibayashi also spoke on the matter, saying the following:
“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!’”
You can check out the rest of the interview over at GameSpot.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is available for the Nintendo Switch and the Wii U.
