Breath Of The Wild Developers Talk Hero’s Path DLC, Mario Odyssey & Zelda II
This past summer Jeuxvideo interviewed Eiji Aonuma, producer of the The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Because the site is in French, most of the snippets went unnoticed until Nintendo Everything decided to translate the full thing. We won’t post the entire transcript, but here are some of the things we found interesting:
Why wasn’t the Hero’s Path Mode of this DLC not included in Breath of the Wild at launch? Was it due to a lack of time?
Eiji Aonuma: Yes, it was mainly a matter of development time. We had this Hero’s Path Mode in mind from the start, but we couldn’t seem to find the right formula and it was going to take a lot of time to find it. How to show it, which reading mode to use… we didn’t know how to implement it in the game and it required some time, but luckily we had that thanks to the DLC.
But there’s another interesting point. If we had given that option from the start, players could have tracked their movements in real time and they wouldn’t have been surprised, although they would have taken advantage of it. But here, the appeal is that you can watch your 200 last hours, and that’s the funny part because players will wonder: “Oh, is that really how I’ve played?”. They’re going to see the route they’ve taken and what’s left to discover. There is this discovery aspect thanks to the timing of the release of the Hero’s Path Mode.
Metroid: Samus Returns, the remake of an important yet not the most popular episode in the series, was announced at E3. Do you think that a remake of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, which has a similar history, would be a good idea?
Eiji Aonuma: Would you like that? We’ll think about it.
After playing Super Mario Odyssey, I noticed the structure of the levels and the search for Power Moons were reminiscent of the sandbox system of Breath of the Wild. Was there any contact between both teams regarding this?
Satoru Takizawa: Actually no, when it comes to exchanging about the game, we didn’t really have that kind of contact. I have an example, by the way: Motokura-san, the director of Super Mario Odyssey, came to see us a month after the release of Breath of the Wild and told me: “Takizawa-san, you really overdid it with your game”. And I wondered what he was talking about. And then he explained to me that our game was so rich and complete that it made things difficult for him. The bottom line is there’s an influence between us when our games are released, but not so much during development.
That being said, when he came to tell me this, I saw in his eyes that he was very confident in his Super Mario Odyssey, and was determined to beat us now.
[Source: Nintendo Everything]
Craig has been covering the video game industry since 1995. His work has been published across a wide spectrum of media sites. He’s currently the Editor-In-Chief of Nintendo Times and contributes to Gaming Age.
