When The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom began development, it started out as a dungeon creator game. That’s according to the game’s developers at Grezzo.
In a Q&A from Nintendo, Grezzo game director Satoshi Terada said that the studio looked at “a few different ways to play the game”.
“In one approach, Link could copy and paste various objects, such as doors and candlesticks, to create original dungeons,” Terada said. “During this exploration phase, this idea was called an “edit dungeon” because players could create their own Legend of Zelda gameplay.”
Producer Eiji Aonuma then chimed in saying that after playing it, he wanted to take the game in different direction.
“As I played, I started thinking that while it’s fun to create your own dungeon and let other people play it, it’s also not so bad to place items that can be copied and pasted in the game field, and create gameplay where they can be used to fight enemies,” he said.
“That was the beginning of gameplay using “echoes.” The gameplay was shifted from creating dungeons up until then to using copied-and-pasted items as tools to further your own adventure.”
The changes were made, according to Tomomi Sano, the first female director in the history of the Zelda franchise, about a year into the game’s development.
” …It’d been that long,” said Terada before Sano chimed in confirming.
“Everyone else was developing the game with dungeon creation in mind, but I was right next to them thinking of something different. (Laughs) But there’s a reason it took a year to upend the tea table,” Aonuma then added.
“After all, you can’t really see the potential for ideas to develop into solid gameplay until you can verify features and their feel, so I wanted them to try making it first. I felt that the “edit dungeon” feature they showed me had significant potential to be developed into a new way of playing the Legend of Zelda games if the gameplay was changed to use “echoes” instead. So, I thought it would be good to expand in that direction and could be even more interesting that way. However, there was one concern. Even though game consoles have larger memory capacity nowadays, the more things players can copy and paste, the more game memory is used up. I was really worried that it would crash the game.”
The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, the first Zelda game to feature Zelda as a main playable character, releases exclusively for Nintendo Switch on September 26.
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