The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was released in March 2017 to widespread critical acclaim. At the heart of the success of this massive open world adventure is a complete reinvention of how of players are introduced to the game mechanics of Hyrule and Link’s epic quest. By removing the item gating and heavy handed tutorials of past games, Breath of the Wild manages to create a seemingly self directed 100+ hours of gameplay that is quite possibly more engaging that all of the games in the series that have come before it.
By looking at the history of The Legend of Zelda series (and a little Mario for good measure) we’ll examine all of the ways that the player is introduced to core game mechanics, and examine how that helped lead to the current reinvention of the series. Along the way we’ll also compare each of these player onboarding experiences to modern user onboarding experiences on the Web - covering the good, bad, and ugly of both the Internet and Hyrule.
While this talk isn’t specific to Drupal in any way, it does cover user experiences that apply throughout the Web - Drupal driven or otherwise. You should leave this session with some new ways to think about how we introduce users to experiences on our sites and web apps. And you’ll also probably want to go and play some video games.
