Zelda | Echoes of Wisdom Devs on How “Edit Dungeon” Became Echoes

With The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom releasing later this week, the upcoming title, which casts Zelda as its protagonist, instead of Link, is the latest game to to be covered as part of Nintendo’s “Ask the Developer” interview series. Across multiple chapters, many questions were asked of Series Producer, Eiji Aonuma, and Directors, Tomomi Sano, and Satoshi Terada.

When talking about their involvement with Echoes of Wisdom, Aonuma, Terada and Sano, elaborate on integrating ideas the team came up with and how they impacted gameplay:

Echoes of Wisdom Devs on How “Edit Dungeon” Became Echoes:

Satoshi Terada: We were exploring a few different ways to play the game in parallel. In one approach, Link could copy and paste various objects, such as doors and candlesticks, to create original dungeons. During this exploration phase, this idea was called an “edit dungeon” because players could create their own The Legend of Zelda gameplay.

Eiji Aonuma: They showed it to me and told me to give it a try. As I played, I started thinking that while it’s fun to create your own dungeon and let other people play it, it’s also not so bad to place items that can be copied and pasted in the game field, and create gameplay where they can be used to fight enemies.

That was the beginning of gameplay using “echoes”. The gameplay was shifted from creating dungeons up until then to using copied-and-pasted items as tools to further your own adventure.

Everyone else was developing the game with dungeon creation in mind, but I was right next to them thinking of something different. (Laughs) But there’s a reason it took a year to upend the tea table. After all, you can’t really see the potential for ideas to develop into solid gameplay until you can verify features and their feel, so I wanted them to try making it first.

I felt that the “edit dungeon” feature they showed me had significant potential to be developed into a new way of playing The Legend of Zelda games if the gameplay was changed to use “echoes” instead. So I thought it would be good to expand in that direction and could be even more interesting that way.

However, there was one concern. Even though game consoles have larger memory capacity nowadays, the more things players can copy and paste, the more game memory is used up. I was really worried that it would crash the game.

But I thought we could make something more interesting if we pushed harder. I wasn’t sure how far we could go, but in the end, it was amazing to see how many echoes it was possible to create in the game. It must have been difficult to manage the game memory.

Tomomi Sano: I did notice from the very beginning that copying new things is a lot of fun in itself. The “edit dungeon” concept involved copying various things during your adventure out on the game field, then bringing them back to create a dungeon in a dedicated place.

When I was on this adventure of collecting things to copy, I noticed that if I pasted something that was only present in the side-view perspective into a location with a top-down perspective, it worked just fine. In 2D games, even if an object looks the same, it’s often made and used completely differently between top-down view and side view. But Grezzo created a single object that would function in both views.

For the full interview, why not click here to check out Ask the Developer Vol. 13, The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom – Chapter 1:

Ask the Developer | The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom (Participating Developers)

• Eiji Aonuma | Senior Officer, Entertainment Planning & Development Division (and Series Producer)
• Tomomi Sano | Entertainment Planning & Development Division, Production Group No.3 (and Director)
• Satoshi Terada | Director, Grezzo