Zelda: Breath of the Wild takes the franchise in a lot of different directions, and the end result was a fantastic experience. It's hard to imagine the game turning out any other way, but this radically new approach to Zelda wasn't always on the cards. Zelda: Breath of the Wild director Hidemaro Fujibayashi and producer Eiji Aonuma sat down with GamesRadar to discuss how the team shed traditional ideas and ventured into new territory with Zelda.
HF: "And then we thought, 'Oh no, why do we actually have to do that?' And a lot of that was re-thinking things specific to Zelda. You know, 'Zelda games have always been like this so we have to make it like this.' But thinking about it from the user's perspective, we wanted to give them more creativity and freedom, thinking, 'Well, no. It doesn't actually have to be like that.' We definitely learned a lot from that whole process. And hearing how people have reacted to that makes me very happy."
Throughout the process of making Breath of the Wild, the entire dev team would regularly play through the game. This included near the end of development, which means over 300 staffers were firing up the game to run through it.
EA: "Initially I thought if we did this we wouldn't have enough time to finish the game, but as we did this more we realized, 'Oh, the staff's motivation is really up too!' And so we realized that we needed to do this to the end.'"
HF: "When they hear the story about 300 people testing the game at the same time, I think what a lot of people misunderstand is [in thinking] that the big leaps ahead came from all of the data we got out of that. And obviously we did get a lot of data out of it. But I think what was even more important was just the fact that people were able to see exactly what they were working on in the game, and also what the people next to them were working on in the game, and figure out, 'Well, what can I do to make that part of the game better?' Getting that group understanding of how everything was working together really leveled up the staff's work, and I think that's a big part of how we came to the level of quality that the game has."
from GoNintendo
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