Watch devs analyze what works about Breath of the Wild's design

Last month Nintendo released The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild alongside its Switch console, so the folks at Game Informer pulled a posse of game developers together for a podcast about the game's design.

That discussion has since been excerpted and published to YouTube for any dev to watch, if you're interested.

It was a pretty celebratory discussion, given that everyone on the panel  -- Campo Santo's Jake Rodkin (Firewatch), 17-Bit's Jake Kazdal (Galak-Z), ArenaNet's Aaron Linde (Guild Wars 2) and Ghost Story Games' Ken Levine (BioShock Infinite) -- were all in the middle of playing and enjoying the game. 

"I think the scale of the world, relative to your travel time, is incredibly well done, and you totally can't see it," noted Rodkin at one point, suggesting Breath of the Wild creates a sort of "Disneyland effect" by presenting players with striking, seemingly distant landmarks and then ensuring the path to get to them feel short and interesting. "The balance of space and travel time is really good, I think."

The full video is worth a watch; we've taken the liberty of embedding it above, but you can also find it (and many, many other videos) over on Game Informer's YouTube channel.