BOTW Director Explains Why You Can’t Pet Dogs, Bokoblins, Or Ganon

The question rises once again (see the blood moon reference?): Why can’t you pet dogs, Bokoblins, or even Calamity Ganon? So many conflicts could be resolved by simply taming your enemies, and it would be pure adorable if Link could pet dogs. But thanks to IGN, BOTW’s director Hidemaro Fujibayashi has become aware of this and answered to the public.

“In the game it seems like you can do anything, but what it really is are all these interlocking systems where you actually have a pretty limited number of actions that can do a ton of different things,” he said. “So if it came down to something like petting a dog, we would actually have to put in a custom action just for petting a dog that couldn’t really be used for anything else. In terms of design philosophy, it just didn’t fit with how we made the game world. It’s actually more about taking a small number of actions and using them in as many ways as possible.”

So basically, the function used in coding “petDog” would not be an interlocking system for use in multiple areas – it wouldn’t be used for anything other than itself – and that’s why the development team simply didn’t add it to BOTW. But fortunately, the director still left some room for possibility: “Maybe if there had been some good reason to do that, we might have done that.”

Okay. So at least it isn’t impossible, as long as there’s a good reason.

Here’s a good reason: Please, development team… let us pet the Bokoblins! They need some love!