The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild remains one of the most magical experiences currently available on the Nintendo Switch. When its sequel was revealed at E3, I believe I speak for gamers everywhere that we were pretty surprised to see this happen. It’s not every day that the Legend of Zelda franchise introduces a direct sequel to one of its games … yet here we are with a continuation of Link and Zelda’s latest adventure on the horizon!
Speaking to Jason Schreier of Kotaku, Legend of Zelda series producer, Eiji Aonuma has spoken about the new sequel and how it came into being as well as a few other details. One of them being the lack of button-remapping in Breath of the Wild, Aonuma said:
“When we have a button arrangement, we very much put thought into how we do it because there’s a specific way we want players to feel. In some ways, if we freely let players do customizations on key assignments and such, I feel like we’re letting go of our responsibility as a developer by just kind of handing everything over to the users. We have something in mind for everybody when we play the game, so that’s what we hope players experience and enjoy as well. But we understand also that players have a desire for free customization.”
As for when it comes to people with a physical handicap, the response was: “Definitely, that’s a very good point, and that’s something we’ll keep in mind going forward, thinking about that.”
When it came to the Breath of the Wild sequel though, it was interestingly born thanks to the development team apparently having way too many DLC ideas for the original game. So, why release little bits here and there when a full new adventure could be produced? Here’s what he had to say:
“When we released the DLC for Breath of the Wild, we realized that this is a great way to add more elements to the same world. But when it comes down to technical things, DLC is pretty much data — you’re adding data to a preexisting title. And so when we wanted to add bigger changes, DLC is not enough, and that’s why we thought maybe a sequel would be a good fit.”
When asked whether or not the new game was originally therefore planned as DLC, he said:
“Initially we were thinking of just DLC ideas, but then we had a lot of ideas and we said, ‘This is too many ideas, let’s just make one new game and start from scratch.’”
Going by the teaser trailer that Nintendo released during E3, you can tell that some of the development teams’ ideas were pretty massive and possibly a little dark (almost Majora’s Mask levels of dark). For Eiji Aonuma and his team working on the sequel, they created magic with that first game, and for the same team working on this as well, they have the incredible opportunity to expand on this brand new Zelda legacy.
We will continue to cover all Zelda-related content right here at GamingLyfe.
