I absolutely love this beautifully produced fake documentary that was published last week.
Imagine the gameplay possibilities. In BOTW, all we can really do with Bokoblins is kill them or ignore them. Occasionally there are encounters where we run into Bokoblins harassing some Hylian travelers or hunting animals. These encounters have their purpose — they allow Link to rescue the Hylians and do something heroic, while the hunting parties provide a demonstration to the player that hunting is possible activity that they could participate in themselves in the game.
But these encounters are somewhat limited and shallow. They don’t build and develop to anything greater. They hint at what could be, however, and I find the possibilities tantalizing.
This video shows potential for a much greater depth possible in the game. If you unlock the “monster shop” Fang and Bone, operated by the creepy, nocturnal Kilton, you can buy monster themed items, including a mask. These masks can be used to fool enemies of the type that the mask is of that you are one of them, allowing you to encounter them without having to fight them. The items from Fang and Bone are not really crucial to completing the game — in fact, they’re completely unnecessary. And in my run through the game, I encountered the shop very late in my exploration of Hyrule, and thus had accumulated so much power that the shop seemed almost pointless. I didn’t need disguises at this point — I was already comfortable hunting down Lynels and Dragons. So I did not explore these possibilities and discover this area of the game very much at all. Clearly, I missed out on some enjoyable, amusing bokoblin antics by not diving into this aspect of the game more.
As I played through Breath of the Wild, I often felt guilty about killing the Bokoblin enemies. They’re almost cute, they’re almost not really dangerous, and it’s clear from their scripted idle behavior that they have a tight-knit tribal culture.
They hunt, they sit around their camp fires, they cook, they dance, they sleep. Sure, they don’t differentiate between people and prey animals as much as we’d prefer, and Bokoblins might get nasty if they detect a threat, but can you blame them? They’re just trying to survive. Why can’t we just get along?
A problem I have with Breath of the Wild is that for being a vast game, it’s depth doesn’t really match its breadth, and thus the game begins to feel repetitive after a certain point. You usually encounter Bokoblins in camps, and they’re pretty much all the same. There’s a camp fire, a few bokoblins sitting about, maybe a cave or some other shelter, a couple of watch towers. You can approach pretty closely and they mostly won’t notice you. And when you grow tired with scouting about the edge of their range of vision, you can pretty much run up at any point and straight up murder them through button mashing without much risk.
They don’t fight very well — your attacks almost never miss, almost always disrupt them, and if you’re just full-on aggressive with them, you can keep them reeling and beat on them repeatedly until they die, which doesn’t usually take very long. Conversely, their attacks aren’t too strong, usually have a big windup that telegraphs to you that you need to either dodge or interdict with a pre-emptive counter attack of your own, and if they do hit you, they will hurt a bit, but you’ll probably be able to shrug it off and hit back and gain the upper hand.
I like bokoblins, and I think they have a lot of potential, but I just don’t find them as interesting as they could have been if they’d been developed a bit more. It seems like a shame, because it feels like a considerable amount of work went into developing them to the point that they were. They exhibit a lot of different behaviors and it gives them personality. The bokoblin documentary shows this quite well. But there’s not that much that you can really do with them, or need to do with them, beyond slaughtering them whenever you encounter them.
This video, though, shows a glimpse of what could have been. Imagine if there were alternatives to fighting that were not just viable, but interesting, rewarding, and even necessary.
Imagine if you could help an injured or trapped bokoblin, and gain its trust.
Imagine if you could approach a camp of freezing, starving bokoblins, and if you approached with your weapons un-equipped, they didn’t immediately regard you as a threat, and if you approached them with your hand outstretched, holding a food item, they would tentatively approach and you could give them the food and then they’d be grateful.
What could they then offer you? Might they trade with you for something that they own, or guard? Might they show you a secret, or allow safe passage through a difficult to get to part of the map? Might you learn how to co-exist peacefully, and put an end to the age-old conflict once the evil Ganon is finally defeated? Might you become an honorary member of their hunting band, and gain allies who come to your aid later when you’re ambushed by another band of hostiles?
I’ve been playing video games for nearly four decades now, and as games become more realistic and immersive, I find myself wanting that reality to offer me solutions to conflicts other than violence and destruction.
I don’t want to be misunderstood in saying this. During my whole life, there has been a pushback against violence in video games. I like videogames, and I like violent videogames. I like shooting everything on the screen, and games where you do nothing but destroy and fight never ending waves of enemies. I just have played enough of them.
I think game designers can challenge themselves, advance the state of the art, and delight players by providing different challenges and different solutions to problems apart from straightforward brute force. And to be fair, Breath of the Wild does this, quite a bit more than most games. It’s just that most of these alternative approaches apply themselves to the games physics puzzles than to dealing with foes. When it comes to foes, you basically can fight, run away, or avoid. The combat system does offer a lot of variety. But what if you encountered foes and didn’t have to fight or sneak? What if you could bribe, negotiate, deceive, trade?
In the late 1990s, games like Thief received critical acclaim because they tried something different — rather than killing everything in the game to overcome challenges, what about using stealth and trickery to avoid violent confrontation that is designed to be impossible to overcome? Nearly 25 years later, I want still more options.
Even in the original Legend of Zelda, we didn’t always fight enemy creatures. Moblins were an overworld enemy who hurled spears at us, and our options were to fight or avoid. But not all of them behaved as enemies.
And who could forget the hungry Goriya from Level 7, who cannot be fought, only placated with food?
There are encounters in Breath of the Wild where Link can give an NPC food or another item, so this sort of interaction with bokoblins wouldn’t be unprecedented, and indeed would have seemed fitting and natural, and a callback to earlier Zelda adventures.
I have a feeling that we’ll get to see such complex, multifaceted interactions in games eventually, and probably we don’t have too much longer to wait for it.