Cooking Breath Of The Wild

*This article was originally published on my personal site.

In this article, I will be criticizing Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

This game has been lauded as one of the greatest of all time. Its fans are passionate, dedicated, and don't take kindly to criticisms of their favorite game. If you are one of those people, what I'm about to say may upset you — I encourage you to stop reading now.

You have been warned.

What Is My Problem?

I hate how cooking is implemented in this game.

For all the excellent design choices in this game, the cooking UX is profoundly lacking. It's slow and frustrating to use, and lacks the attention to detail present in the rest of the game.

The following is a list of grievances regarding the cooking system in Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It is not exhaustive, but covers the critical design flaws.

I've also provided a potential solution for each issue. There are no sweeping UI changes here — just small improvements that address the underlying cause of frustration with minimal effort.

Disclaimer

I am not a game developer, nor am I a designer. I am completely unqualified to suggest improvements to one of the most revolutionary games of the past decade, from one of Nintendo's most iconic franchises. That said, I'm going to do it anyway — because I feel like it!

Cooking UX Issues

Here are the primary gripes I have with cooking in Breath of the Wild:

1. You need a pot to cook.
2. You can only cook one item at a time.
3. It's difficult to remember ingredient effects.

Let's dive into each of those points in more detail.

1. You need a pot to cook.

The first issue is one of accessibility: you can only cook where there is a fire and a cooking pot. This limits the places where cooking can happen — when exploring the far reaches Hyrule, players can often go long stretches without crossing a cooking location.

This scarcity means cooking sessions in Breath of the Wild are long and infrequent instead of short and frequent. This is a problem because the system is not optimized for long cooking sessions. Meals can only be created one at a time (more on this later), meaning users have no choice but to repeat the same process over and over.

In addition, this creates a gulf between exploration and preparation as players must backtrack to a known cooking fire to replenish their meals. For a game that relies so heavily on exploration and freedom, limiting accessibility to cooking is an odd choice that detracts from the game's themes.

Solution: add a cooking pot to Link's inventory.

The underlying issue here is that limiting cooking locations creates a mismatch between expected behavior — cooking frequently, in small quantities — with the user's actual behavior.

Adding a pot to Link's inventory would remove accessibility barriers, encouraging players to cook more often. This in turn shortens cooking sessions, preserving the existing process while alleviating the frustration that comes from repetitive tasks.

2. You can only cook one item at a time

As I mentioned earlier, limited cooking spots encourages cooking in large quantities. However, there is no way to make more than one meal at a time. This makes long cooking sessions arduous, especially when trying to create many identical meals.

Any time spent in a game menu is time spent not playing the game. Forcing players to constantly return to the inventory menu to repeat a nearly identical process isn't just boring — it's bad design.

Solution: allow players to duplicate a meal after making it

There is no reason the player shouldn't be able to create more than one identical meal at a time if they have the ingredients. The implementation is simple — upon creating a meal, add an option to "create X more meals."

With one small addition, players can now easily replicate recipes without constantly thumbing through the inventory screen. Time spent cooking would dramatically decrease, allowing more time to actually enjoy the game.

3. It's difficult to remember ingredient effects.

Meals in Breath of the Wild can have various beneficial effects — heat resistance, extra stamina, and raised defense, to name a few. In the above food UI, these effects are helpfully denoted by symbols in the corner of each meal icon.

When looking at the ingredients, these symbols are strangely absent. Instead of providng that information up front, the game forces the player to read the item description — a cardinal sin in UX design, where simplicity and transparency of information are paramount.

Of all the design choices in Breath of the Wild, this is the most baffling.

Solution: use the meal effect symbols for ingredients as well

The symbols already exist in the food menu. Simply reusing these symbols in the materials menu would be enough to fix this problem. The symbols could even remain hidden until the ingredients are used in cooking for the first time, to ensure player's still read those precious item descriptions at least once.

As a bonus improvement, this feature could enable sorting inventory by effect, not just by type. This would speed up the search for ingredients with a particular effect, streamlining the process further.

Conclusion

Cooking in Breath of the Wild is a great idea, poorly executed. Bad UX design choices turn an otherwise fresh mechanic into something that distracts (and detracts) from the core gameplay.

That said, the system is not unsalvageable. Just a few small improvements can mitigate the major problems without sacrificing the look and feel of what's already been created.

Breath of the Wild 2 has been announced, although the release date is still unknown. I look forward to seeing how the sequel builds on the foundations of the original. I hope next time I visit Hyrule, it's a little easier to make an omelette.

Cooking Breath Of The Wild

Source: https://bootcamp.uxdesign.cc/improving-cooking-in-breath-of-the-wild-2340b278de24

Posted by: dawdide1988.blogspot.com

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