“Hang on, why is Nintendo remaking Ocarina of Time again?” It’s a natural question that might have occurred to you in the last few months, and in the latest Ask the डेवलपर interview, Series Producer Eiji Aonuma had the answer.
Part of the reason for returning to the title, it turns out, was to try to “trigger new insights” from the developers that may feed into future Zelda games. “Many of the team members who work alongside me on Legend of Zelda games today have only experienced developing the more recent titles,” Aonuma-san says. “That led me to wonder, ‘Do they truly understand just how significant The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was to the series as a whole?'”
“I started to wonder how they’d interpret The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time as they go about developing future Legend of Zelda games,” he continues. “By learning the game structure and development style behind the original The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and by actually rebuilding it as a full remake, it may trigger new insights that they can carry forward into future development.”
While he describes the potential behind such insights as “extremely valuable,” he also notes that it wasn’t the only reason he wanted to return to OoT for the series’ 40th anniversary. The game’s structure is drastically different from more recent series entries like Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, two games that a whole generation of Zelda fans will have grown up on (as sobering a thought as that is), so Nintendo wanted to showcase a different style of gameplay, too:
In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, part of the fun comes from progressing through a carefully paced adventure and story, gradually building up the player’s growth and their understanding of the narrative along the way. We wanted players who had grown accustomed to Legend of Zelda games like Breath of the Wild, where they can freely choose their own path from the start, to experience that kind of gameplay as well
Whether revisiting Ocarina of Time actually does influence any future games’ design decisions remains to be seen, but if you’re looking for GoodGameTM inspiration, it certainly isn’t a bad place to start.
The Ask the डेवलपर interview also revealed that Ocarina of Time was internally developed at Nintendo, with HokWai Ng in the Director’s seat.
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