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, Sano and Terada all spoke at great length regarding some of the difficulties they were faced with when trying to find the right balance to properly implement the feature:
Echoes of Wisdom Devs on Implementing Echoes:
Satoshi Terada: We struggled with the ideas for echoes. Since the gameplay involves copying and pasting things that you find in the game field, they have to be something that can both help and hinder you. They also need to work both in a top-down and side-view perspective.
Eiji Aonuma: When you’re fighting an enemy, it’s advantageous for them to be weak. But if you want to make them your ally, you’d prefer it if they put up more of a fight. Naturally, you’ll want to have strong allies who can fight by your side, but you’ll need to defeat them first. If you couldn’t make them your ally, then there would be no point in having them in the game. But if you recruit one that’s too strong, they’d be able to defeat enemies on their own, making other echoes seem inferior… It’s challenging to find the right balance.
Satoshi Terada: If an echo is too useful, then it’s unlikely that you’d use anything else… We wanted to encourage players to try out lots of different things using a variety of echoes.
Eiji Aonuma: The water blocks were especially tricky.
For the side view, it’s fine to simply represent a flat water surface, but for the top-down view, it will be represented in 3D, so we need to create a cube-shaped water object that appears in the game field. Also, the player has to be able to go inside that water block and swim. We found a way to connect the blocks vertically and horizontally, but when you swam inside, you would fall out from the connections between them. It wasn’t working at all! (Laughs)
Satoshi Terada: It certainly was…a challenge. (Laughs)
Then, even if we managed to find the right balance between enemy and ally and between top-down and side views, we also needed to consider all the different places where players might use these echoes.
Eiji Aonuma: Like, what happens if you meet a monster in the snowy mountains and then create an echo of it in a volcano? It was a lot of work to ensure that things worked consistently and that the game wouldn’t fall apart if players used an echo in an area different from the one where they’d found it.
Satoshi Terada: Since there are so many echoes at your disposal, we made sure to give each one a specific characteristic so that players would remember what each one does. We wanted players to be able to remember off the top of their heads which echo to use in certain situations.
Tomomi Sano: Having the freedom to solve puzzles by yourself is a key feature of The Legend of Zelda games. But having too much freedom can leave you feeling stumped. We made a conscious effort to clearly define the functions of each echo so that players understand how and where they should be used. We were mindful of designing it so that players could reach the gameplay elements we wanted them to experience without getting lost and confused.
Also, Princess Zelda doesn’t have a way of attacking directly initially, so there was a tendency for the gameplay using the echoes to just end up being a situation where you watched the things you copied do the work. It felt like they were doing everything for you and you were being made to wait…
So we asked Grezzo to adjust it so that players would feel an immediate sense of accomplishment like, “I did it!”. For example, if you made an echo of a monster, that echo would immediately attack an enemy, just like you swinging a sword. Or if you wanted to light a fire, you could use an echo with that ability, and it would light the fire straight away
We made adjustments like these all the way through the game’s development so that these kinds of intuitive responses would feel exciting for players.
For the full interview, why not click here to check out Ask the Developer Vol. 13, The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom – Chapter 2:
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
