The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild - Aonuma discusses the game's connection to nature

The following is Eiji Aonuma's response to a fan question about Breath of the Wild...

Question 1: How did you come up with the idea of putting nature at the very center of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild?

Answer: The games in the Legend of Zelda series have always been about Link’s evolution in his own world. At the beginning of the game, he isn’t very strong, but he gradually gets stronger. If the various [Zelda] games take place in environments with lots of nature, it’s because we thought those were the best for the kind of stories we wanted to tell.

And this time around, nature is an even more important element than ever before, that’s a directorial choice. Since you’re completely free to go wherever you want, that you get to travel a lot, we had to create this huge world with vast plains, in order to provide players with a fully immersive experience.

It’s for this very reason that we paid a lot of attention to animations, ambient sounds, and sound effects for nature, so that you can really be engrossed in the various environments.