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In this interview conducted by French publication Gamekult, Miyamoto discusses the evolution of Zelda’s design philosophy, the sci-fi elements of Breath of the Wild, and how they balanced traversal mechanics.
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By Boulapoire (Matthieu Hurel) for Gamekult, June 18 2016
*During the last day of E3, often crammed with as many games stands visits as possible before closing time, we had the chance to talk to a Japanese creator that made a bit of a reputation for himself in the gaming world: Shigeru Miyamoto.
With his acolyte Bill Trinen in toe--one of the funders of the Treehouse, since then director and product marketing manager for Nintendo of America--the most famous “Creative Fellow” of video gaming was down on the show floor to try a few games and answer our questions for a (too short) 20-minute interview. The given theme being the upcoming The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and the 30th anniversary of the series, we tried to find more interesting topics to discuss than the length of the game or its place in the “great timeline.” We hope you will like this interview!*
Shigeru Miyamoto, 2016. Image from ‣.
Bill Trinen. Image from Eurogamer.it.
Q: To begin with, I would like to talk about the lineage between Breath of the Wild and the original NES The Legend of Zelda. Do you still replay the first game from time to time, to see how the series evolved? Shigeru Miyamoto: The relationship between Breath of the Wild and The Legend of Zelda mostly comes from playtesters’ feedback; we weren’t really trying to recreate the first Zelda. Back in the day it was built upon the ideas of great freedom of action and miniature gardens. As the series evolved, we turned it more and more into a game with a single path to follow. This pushed us to create bigger and more complex dungeons and to design puzzles requiring specific items, which led to very linear games. So we decided to go back to the roots of the saga and started developing the game we’re showing you today.
Q: At first I was surprised by the focus on technology in [the world of Breath of the Wild], and then I thought back on what you said to us in an interview a few years ago about the initial concept for Zelda where Link traveled through time and the Triforce was made of electronic chips. Aren’t you, thirty years later, fully realizing this vision?*
Miyamoto: To be honest, I mostly let Mr. Aonuma take care of this project and I was very surprised to see some kind of smartphone appear in the game [laugh]. At first, I told myself: “Can we really do that?” But yes, ever since the first Zelda we’ve thought about including technological elements and making Link a “link” between different times through a computer program. Now that [modern technology] has made huge leaps forward … and gotten better and better, we told ourselves it would be better suited to convey this technological idea.
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Q: Considering the director for this game is Mr. Fujibayashi and he directed Skyward Sword, did you keep the fragmented design method from that episode, with a different team in charge of each in-game region?
Miyamoto: First of all, the core of the programming team is made up of new people, gathering together the best internal talents from Nintendo. For the art team we have people who worked on older Zelda games coming back to offer a unique visual style to this game, thanks to new shaders and other homemade tools. We also made sure those nice graphics worked with the technical requirements of an open world, with few visible loading times. We had to scale up our programming and art teams to reach our objective, thanks in part to the help of people who worked on the Xenoblade series [at Nintendo subsidiary Monolith Soft]. All in all, it amounts to more than a hundred people working on the project.
Screenshot of Monolith Soft’s Xenoblade Chronicles (2010).
Q: Are other first party studios involved in the development of this game?
Bill Trinen: There are members from other Nintendo teams who often share their knowledge with other internal studios and thus we had representatives from other studios coming to help the team in charge of Zelda.
Q: I noticed the game surfaces more numbers than usual, but on the other hand the rupee counter and money in general seems to be gone. Is it the case, and if yes, why?
Miyamoto: As we reinvented the Zelda series, we looked into rupees because we received a lot of feedback about gathering lot of rupees but not having enough interesting ways to spend them. In such a free and open game we thought they were losing their value as collectibles. They are present in the final version, in a different way that implies combinations and other surprises.
A screenshot of Breath of the Wild from the E3 2016 build.
Q: How do you make sure the stamina gauge when Link runs, or the fact weapons can break, doesn’t become too much of a burden for players, to the point it breaks pacing and discourages many people?
Miyamoto: It’s true that it’s a difficult balance to find, especially considering that it’s a world we explore over both big horizontal distances and in a vertical fashion. We wanted to show, in a concrete way, that the character can travel as he likes and improve over the game. For a character with an unlimited run, we would probably have just shrunk the map. Right now, we have faster ways to move around like the horse, the warp points and the paraglider, which can be used in complementary ways to make exploration more varied. Link’s ability to run and climb serves as a benchmark to decide everything else.
Trinen: There will also be mechanics to recharge your stamina faster by combining or cooking items. You will be able to find ways to increase your max stamina, temporarily or permanently. You have to keep in mind that the demo playable at E3 is only a small part of the game and doesn’t allow you to ride a horse or to use the paraglider, two ways that completely change the way you perceive distances. When you get the chance to glide over long distances and try to do the same on foot, you will see how it changes everything.
Q: What’s your involvement in such an important project for Nintendo?
Miyamoto: In the past I was hugely invested in Zelda games, whether that meant laying out the fundamentals or tweaking details as we went. With help from my team, I could deliver a fully playable game and then let them take care of the closing. Nowadays, considering the size of the game, there are many different teams involved with production. For instance, one is dedicated to integrating the physics engine. So nowadays I’m mostly performing small checks over the way Link handles and responds to player input, but after validating a checklist I’m leaving the rest to the developers. As we reach the end of development, I believe my involvement may grow to polish the game as much as possible.
Q: Mr. Aonuma recently explained in an interview that it would theoretically be possible to reach the end of the game immediately after the start, even though he believes it would be bad to experience the game for the first time this way. Does that at least mean there are incentives to play the game multiple times, like a second quest or multiple endings?
Miyamoto: Honestly, I don’t know! [laugh] That said, even with a very open game with many things to master we kept a main quest and a clearly identified final boss to defeat. Rather than a complicated approach like multiple endings, I believe it’s more important to let players choose their own way to go through the game.
Trinen: Mr. Aonuma meant to say it was possible to take on this kind of challenge—which I know because I tried it myself, but I got really scared and fled quickly! [laugh] So you can try to [finish the game quickly], but it won’t be easy at all.
Q: Can we go through the entire game wearing only the starting underwear?
Trinen: Yes, you can! [laugh]
Link in his underwear in the Shrine of Resurrection
Q: For years now we’ve often been talking about the possibility to play as a female character in a Zelda game. Given her important role in the story and her name over the franchise, can we hope to one day see a game starring Zelda as the main protagonist? If Tingle could get two games to his name on DS, surely there’s a way to do something for her, right?
Miyamoto: We definitely had talks with the team to make a game focused on the character of Sheik, so I can’t say such a thing is impossible in the future, but in the mainline episodes of the series, Link is the hero and that won’t change. Beyond that, you will have to wait and see!