With just days to go before the release of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Nintendo has published a brand-new instalment of their “Ask the Developer” interview series. This time around the interview was all about Tears of the Kingdom and had the likes of Eiji Aonuma answering the many questions that were out before him and other members of the development team.
During the interview, Takizawa and Wakai were asked about making changes to the Hyrule first seen in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild:
Zelda Devs on Making Changes to Breath of the Wild’s Hyrule:
Satoru Takizawa: “I keenly felt that implementing something new into the same world was actually harder than creating something from scratch. Although it is the same world, we want to make sure players experience it with a new sense of wonder. So to achieve that, we had to take a world originally made up of things we’d designed to fit it perfectly, and then bolt a new layer of surprises on top of it, designed from a different perspective. And we had to do so without erasing the familiar world.
Even though we racked our brains last time to put it all together! Of course, from the development staff’s point of view, it’s definitely more fun to come up with ideas for creating new surprises, but it sure was a challenging development process.”
Hajime Wakai: “For the game’s music, we broke the conventions of the series in the previous game and mainly used piano tones. While this title follows the same musical direction, we grappled with how to create a sense of freshness as a sequel. The sound effects are generated by a completely new system that’s different from the previous game, so even if the same sound is used, it sounds a lot more realistic in this game. For
For example, in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, we tried to make nearby environmental sounds, such as bird calls, sound realistic. However, with this title, the expressiveness of these sounds has improved to the point where players hear a bird call from afar and sense the distance more realistically.
For the full interview, why not click here to check out Ask the Developer Vol. 9, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom – Chapter 1.
Ask the Developer | The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (Participating Developers)
- Eiji Aonuma | Senior Officer, Entertainment Planning & Development Division (Producer)
- Hidemaro Fujibayashi | Entertainment Planning & Development Department, Production Group No.3 (Director)
- Takuhiro Dohta | Entertainment Planning & Development Department, Programming Management Group (Technical Director)
- Satoru Takizawa | Entertainment Planning & Development Department, Design Management Group (Art Director)
- Hajime Wakai | Entertainment Planning & Development Department, Sound Management Group (Sound Director)
