In case you missed it yesterday, what started out as a simple poll on Twitter, ended up being anything but.
We wanted to see how our followers would feel about a Zelda game being made by Davide Soliani, Rain Games or even Capcom once again, even if the latter solely worked on a remaster of the game they’ve done before, or had Rain Games do it for them. Now, to be up front, I already went into the whole “Rain Games should be allowed to make a Zelda game” thing, which you can see for yourself by clicking here, but today isn’t about that. Today is about the numerous responses our poll got from World to the West designer Ole Ivar Rudi and believe me, he said plenty.From talking about the decision for split characters, Zelda inspirations and even scrapped plans for a 3DS port, we really got to learn more about what is simply a beautiful game that is coming to the Nintendo Switch next month. So because of what was said, we felt it was fitting to dedicate an article to the bigger responses and share them in their tweet form, rather than a boring copy and paste job. Without further ado, here are our highlights:
Aw thank you!!! WttW was our first 3d game so we went with a very basic art style- we wanted to be able to build and iterate levels quick and be sure that we could port it to lower spec hardware like the wii u
— 🐱ri-Warui (@oleivarrudi) December 30, 2017
The art direction target was "good ps2 or gamecube HD remaster" 😀
— 🐱ri-Warui (@oleivarrudi) December 30, 2017
We actually had a 3ds kit and were considering doing a port, but we'd basically have to remake it ground up for the platform and we didn't have the budget for that
— 🐱ri-Warui (@oleivarrudi) December 30, 2017
We decided very early on to do a switch port, very impressed with the system-especially as a handheld. Very developer-friendly, too.
— 🐱ri-Warui (@oleivarrudi) December 30, 2017
At that point we didn't have the development tools yet, but we were in talks about getting a kit.
Actual porting didn't start until the pc version had been completed though— 🐱ri-Warui (@oleivarrudi) December 30, 2017
*The Interview in Question was Conducted in September, 2016.
We were definitely hopeful at that point, let me tell you that:D It still took a while before we got the final official ok though
— 🐱ri-Warui (@oleivarrudi) December 30, 2017
We basically did the teslagrad port as a test to familiarize ourselves with the hardware, but were so pleased with how it ran on the hardware that we decided to do a full release port alongside wttw
— 🐱ri-Warui (@oleivarrudi) December 30, 2017
I toyed a bit with remaking the zelda 1 overworld as a test to get familiar with our level editing tools for world to the west, actually:D
Don't have any pictures at hand though, as i'm visiting family over the holidays— 🐱ri-Warui (@oleivarrudi) December 30, 2017
The oracle games were a huge influence on world to the west, the character swapping is sort of analogous to the season swapping in OoS when i think about it.
— 🐱ri-Warui (@oleivarrudi) December 30, 2017
The main reason for doing split characters was that we didn't want you to have to go into a menu to swap traversal items all the time, but rather readjust yourself to the different opportunities for each character
— 🐱ri-Warui (@oleivarrudi) December 30, 2017
That came into play after replaying link's awakening and the oracle games. They are some of my favourite zeldas, but you spend A LOT of time swapping items when moving from one end of the map to another, especially in LA
— 🐱ri-Warui (@oleivarrudi) December 30, 2017
Ole, if you’re reading this, your responses were brilliant and we thank you for taking the time to tweet them and if you’re not Ole and want to see what else he had to say, why not check out our ongoing poll yourself and sieve through the responses. There is quite a bit we didn’t cover!
Let's pretend a European developer was allowed to work on a Zelda game be it new, a remake or remaster. Who'd you rather see at helm? @DavideSoliani and Ubisoft Milan, @Capcom_UK or @rain_games? (World to the West)
— Miketendo64: 🔜 EGX 2023 | 🎮 (@miketendo64) December 30, 2017
Source: @oleivarrudi (Twitter)
