Die Stimme, die Link zu Beginn hört, sagt ja, dass er 100 Jahre geschlafen hat.

Wenn die Stimme also nicht auch von dieser technologisierten Zivilisation stammt und wir von denen nur an der Nase herumgeführt werden, dann glaube ich schon, dass Link Link ist^^

Was ich in diesem Spiel bevorzuge, ist die wahrlich gigantische Aktionsfreiheit. Das Spiel ist so entworfen, dass jeder Berg erklommen werden kann und eine der Hauptmechaniken ist es, die Gipfel zu erreichen. Die Welt ist zudem so konzipiert, dass man von erhöhten Orten einen großen Überblick hat und man beim Erspähen eines interessanten Platzes, diesen mit dem Gleiter erreichen kann. Der Ablauf ist jedes mal gleich, Man klettert, schaut sich um und gleitet. Diese Form der Fortbewegung habe ich in bisher noch keinem anderen Spiel gesehen und ich denke, dass dies neu und sehr spaßig ist. Das ist der Aspekt der mir am besten gefällt.

Bitte ey, naja wenigstens kann Vyse jetzt beruhigt sein... natürlich wird einem die Bewegungssteuerung nicht aufgezwungen

“Breath of the Wild” is the biggest project from Nintendo. Can you detail its budget, workforce, and development time?

Eiji Aonuma: I obviously cannot talk about how much it cost, but about the workforce, we were comprised of three hundred. Development went on for about four years.

You insisted in many interviews on how much you listened to fans. Have you made a specific organization for this?

No, we just ask the localization teams to get us the opinions they can find. The voices that I listen to the most, personally, are from Japan because I can get them without any filters. But we are trying to understand what’s going on everywhere, according to territories, because not everyone will ask for the same thing. For example, American players don’t like when they have to increase their abilities to progress in a game, like Monster Hunter.

Nintendo has been repeating for several months that this new Zelda entry marks a major turning point in the series. In what sense?

Before, the obvious choice in terms of game design was to have areas linked together by small paths, which you would only pass through. Many people reproached us for lacking freedom. Even here, a lot of designers thought fun lay in following an existing path. But this time, the player is dropped into the world of Breath of the Wild and they can go anywhere, whenever they want, kind of like the first Zelda. I think Breath of the Wild will be a key moment in the history of the series.

The first “Zelda” was designed like a role-playing game without experience points and gaining levels. Were you tempted to go back to it similar to many modern open world games such as “Far Cry” or “Final Fantasy XV”?

Absolutely not. The system we’ve put in place is to gain power by finding new weapons. Every monster drops one, and its power depends on the force of the creature itself.

To obtain high level equipment, you need to sometimes pull off some tricks and use stratagems. And as you’ve noticed, weapons break, which obligates you to repeat that cycle. It is one of the principles of Breath of the Wild, allowing us to manage progression without going through sempiternal figures that punctuate traditional role-playing.

Serge Hascoët, Ubisoft’s creative director, told to us that “Breath of the Wild” reminds him of “Far Cry” and “Assassin’s Creed”, but with a slower character. For him, it gives the impression of a bigger world, and contributes to more immersion. Do you agree with that analysis?

I hope he wasn’t talking about the animation’s fluidity! [He cracks up laughing.] It is nice of him, but we didn’t think of it that way. Link’s speed is adapted to the pace of the game. There are many things hidden in the world, you can of course run, but you would miss everything we have hidden.

Are there elements of the open world role-playing game Skyrim which you acknowledge having drawn inspiration from?

What I really liked about Skyrim, is that when you walk around and then you enter a new city, there’s a real shock. “Ah, there’s a city here! Oh, it is so different from the others!” That was the first time that I felt like this in a video game, so I wanted to incorporate this in Zelda, though in a different way.

That’s why you can climb everywhere, and once at the top, you can tell yourself “Oh, there’s maybe something over there… What if I went up that river?”. So you take your paraglider and you explore the world after spotting it. This pleasure of discovery, I wanted to take from Skyrim, because I’ve never felt it elsewhere.

Before, for every dungeon, you start from a specific theme and a specific item, like fire and bombs, water and bow, etc. Now that you have several dozens of dungeons, how do you maintain variety?

There are more than an hundred actually! We don’t talk about “dungeons” anymore but “shrines”. If they were all long and complex, players would probably never finish the game, so we wanted to make them rewards rather than trials. Fun resides for many in finding them, because several are very well hidden. They are very different from those of the previous Zeldas, even if some are bigger and contain a boss at the end in a more traditional way.

However, we don’t make those like before. If a temple was in a forest, we made it the forest dungeon. Now, they are designed to make Link progress and are all built from a similar base, but using the game’s physics engine to offer stimulating puzzles.

“Zelda’s” architecture is always very polished, between the Romanesque style of the Temple of Time and the Gothic architecture of the Ganon’s castle. Are you inspired by certain real places?

We aren’t inspired by real places, we mostly assemble from several pieces of architecture of the world, to tell what we want to tell. For example, if we want to make a temple that feels really like a “temple”, then we take from different temples. If it is more like a castle, then we take from different castles that picks up our interest to tell what we want. The notable exception was Ocarina of Time: it was the first time we built Hyrule in 3D, and we tried as much as possible to take the same base to maintain some continuity.

You tend to reuse certain monuments from one episode to another, such as the Temple of Time in both The Wind Waker and Breath of the Wild, or even the whole world of Hyrule in A Link Between Worlds. Is there a wish to spark nostalgia within players?

It’s more of a consequence than an objective. When you decide to make a game in the world of Hyrule, it seems normal to use what already exists, so that it seems consistent to us. This time, though the world is gigantic, there’s also a wish to take a bit of every previous Hyrule the players have explored.

When you directed your first Zelda, The Wind Waker, in 2002, the fans criticized both the visual style – considered too childish – and the maritime aspect that made the world a little empty. With Breath of the Wild, do you have the sensation of giving them something closer to what they wanted, fifteen years later?

At the time of The Wind Waker, I wanted to make more islands, but we were limited by the power of the console. And then, if there were too many islands, the boat would bump into them all the time and there wouldn’t be any feeling of adventure. In the end, the game became what it is, but it is true that I would have liked more exploration, and that we had to wait until the Wii U [and Switch] to make that possible. It was not, however, where we started from for Breath of the Wild, even if it does meet these expectations.

As for the visual style, it was not a wish to pay tribute to Wind Waker, but a choice of game design. Since you have a very huge world in Breath of the Wild, simplified drawings make the objectives much easier to read and see. Besides, you might suspect that all our artists have been raised by Japanese animation, and this style of graphics is our strength as well as one of the particularities of Japanese video games.

Fifteen years ago, you wrote the lines of the King of Red Lions, The Wind Waker’s boat, like messages to your son who had just been born. Do you keep disseminating personal messages in Breath of the Wild?

No, I stopped! My son told me he had enough of it, that he had grown up. However, I insisted that I should write the dialogue for the old man that you encounter at the beginning of the adventure, because it is the first person you talk to in the game, and I wanted to be the first to speak to the player. Even if this time, it is not meant for my son.

⊙The release date was finally announced March 3rd. It has been a long time for a new Zelda game on home console since Skyward Sword(2011/118)

F: Yeah. It has been 5 years.

⊙Has the game been totally completed.

F: Sure. We are ready for shipping.

⊙The game has to be ready for sale almost right after it's been completed. How did it feel?

F: It's very satisfied that lots of my ideas could be realized in the game. I am also very excited that players can finally play this game.

⊙Let's change another subject. Tell us about the concept of BoTW this time.

F: Generally, the key point is "to review everything that we take for granted in LoZ". This is what Mr. Eiji Aonuma talked about in many places. This time I could explain this as the director. We prepared some consoles for players to experience gameplay. They were allowed to try lots of actions on the field. This is what LoZ series are about, allowing players to do various actions such as throwing, swinging, and pushing. This time however we added lots of gimmicks on the field corresponding to those actions. We called the kind of combination " the multiplication of playing", which is also the motif of this game. For example, when you see a location where you won't be able to get by any means. The process for you to think and try every mean to get there is sort of an application of "multiplication of playing".

⊙In the gameplay, we can see a cliff appeared early in the game. You can also fell big trees to make a bridge to get through the cliff.

F: Yes. You can do that.

⊙It feels like there are many solutions rather than one.

F: There may have been a "single road" to the LoZ games so far. But this time there will be a lot of solutions for one question. Including some we didn't even imagine during the development. Every time one solution was discovered, it surprised even the developers that you could do it this way.

⊙I see. So, the experiences of gameplay and the information sharing to others will be different from each individual.

F: During development, the staff often developed the game and at the same time test it. Even when we were doing the same scene test play, the the conversations were different. "I did it this way." "What? I did it that way!" So many times after knowing the way others did it, it felt like "Oh! I didn't came up with that. And this is the part I would like you all to experience.

⊙The concept "to review everything that we take for granted in LoZ". How did you judge how much it should be reviewed? After all, it would disappoint fans if too much of what we knew about Zelda were changed.

F: In fact we were exploring the borderline while developing the game. Through thinking about "what is a Zelda game should be", we were able to define a Zelda game to be a game with moments when you engage a dungeon, a question, the surrounding of unknown puzzles, and also the surprising moments when you finally solve them. After keeping those basic elements, we started some conversations such as: "Can't we play the way we used to play in the dungeons now on the field?" Or on the contrary: "It might also be interesting if we play the way we used to play on the field in the dungeons?" This is a kind of multiplication of playing I mentioned before. Players could get through a puzzle by method 1, method 2 or change method 3 into method 4, even completely different method A or B. It naturally differed a lot from other Zelda games. We just simply tried to change the "I am getting tired of another routine of Zelda" experiences. We considered why we're getting tired meanwhile thinking about how to make puzzles more interesting in another way. And these thoughts became part of the multiplication of playing experiences. I didn't set principles of changing. I just tried to convince the staff that it's possible for us to change the concept that "if we change something, it wouldn't be Zelda anymore".

⊙It seems that you not only changed the routines, but also got rid of the old frame of Zelda games.

F: Yes, you can say that we want to break the frame. With this idea, we have to create something different.

⊙Speaking of reviewing everything that we take for granted in LoZ, we can find such changes in Zelda games these years. For example, the stamina gauge apeared in Skyward Sword, and in Triforce 2 the items management didn't shown in numbers but gauges as well as in BoTW. This must also be the result of reviewing everything that we take for granted.

F: Of course, the know-how of the system which we have adopted so far has also been accumulated, we also know the advantages and disadvantages of each system, so there are also parts that I have referred to.

⊙I see. This time players are allowed to reach anywhere in the scenery. Are there ends in the map?

F: That is the best part of it. I think that it is better to actually play it and check whether there are ends or not.

⊙The map of the game is so enormous that there should be a lot of places to explore. Would it be very time-consuming.

F: You can ride horses and there are shrines for teleporting. But you are not able to teleport with a shrine before activating it.

⊙Can we just walk by foot through the whole game?

F: Of course. As the map is very wide. There are mountains, valleys and some places you just can't bypass. There are also places where are easy to arrive but horrible on the way back. This time whenever you pick a destination, you will face the choices such as "should I bypass it or climb over it?" No matter which way you take, you can get through it with skills that Link has learned. Once you choose to climb over it, the stamina will be very important. There have to be placed for you to rest and recover the stamina on the way climbing. Or you might think that this way seems impossible, I should take another way. You have to arrange the route by yourself. And with hang gliding, some places might be hard to get to, but easy to return. It's just like in real life. If you tried to get to somewhere, you had to think about it before you act.

⊙It seems that you would like players to think in different ways.

F: That's right. Zelda series might give people an impression of difficulty and maniac in the past. But I give you an example of the ax you can get early in the game. Axes are often used as weapons in games. However after considering what they are for in the first place, not only Japanese but everyone in the world can figure out what to do with them. What players figure out should be similar all over the world.

⊙Daily life ideas are useful in the game. By cooking and eating a meal, you can recover the heart and increase the stamina gauge.

F: The system of heart and stamina could be enhanced with food, and sometimes clothes. Or you can deal with it somehow by your actions.

⊙In the past, if players weren't able to defeat specific enemies, they might think " I must haven't get the necessary item yet." However it won't be that way in this game, right?

F: Right. Such enemies could be defeated in various methods. Players who are not good at actions now can explore different method to defeat them, and might even be able to knock them down cowardly.

⊙I am curious about what is the coward way. But in order to realize all the different methods, it must took lots of time on development. Did any unexpected bugs or something occur during the test?

F: They did happen. But they also created some interesting results in some cases, that we even allowed them to be part of the game rather than correcting them.

Atmosphere-Trailer. Traumhaft!

https://nplusx.de/story/723-atmosphere-trailer-zu-the-legend-of-zelda-breath-of-the-wild

Zelda ist fertig! Abschlussfeier des Teams von Zelda (Nintendo und Monolith):