The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – The Champions’ Ballad interview (Part 3, Dungeons)
Last week (December 8th), Nintendo released the second DLC for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild… The Champions’ Ballad. The release was announced at the Game Awards, and following that show, Nintendo caught up with Eiji Aonuma (Producer) and Hidemaro Fujibayashi (Director) in order to discuss that DLC.
The interview is currently available only via the News feature on the Nintendo Switch, so for those of you who are interested in it but don’t have access to the console or the internet right now, we transcribed it below.
The first part of the interview was published last week, and we thought that the following parts would be published on a weekly basis… but instead, Nintendo went and published all remaining parts at once! In this post, you will find Part 3!
***
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – The Champions’ Ballad Interview – Part 1
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – The Champions’ Ballad Interview – Part 2
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – The Champions’ Ballad Interview – Part 4
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – The Champions’ Ballad Interview – Part 5
***
Nintendo: Is there anything you want to say to new players, Mr. Aonuma?
Aonuma: Sine this game is part of the Zelda game series, some people may assume that you need to play the other games to understand it. However, Link starts this game without any memories. So it’s a game where Link goes on a journey figuring out who he is, and why he was asleep there. Because of this, players can enjoy the game without knowing anything about the past Zelda series games, and it’s a game focused on discovering what the game is about. In addition, some games we’ve created don’t allow players to progress without defeating specific enemies. In BotW, there’s so much you can do that doesn’t require defeating enemies, and by doing tasks that don’t require defeating them, it can help you defeat enemies you couldn’t defeat before. And even if you still can’t defeat some enemies, you can discover new things to do and progress the game at your own pace. I would be happy if players that have gotten lost and stuck in other games play this game –it was designed to open up more paths as you explore.
Nintendo: Let’s talk shrines and dungeons! First, how do you go about designing the dungeons in the main story?
Fujibayashi: Ah, yes, there were two approaches. Since these dungeons focus on physics, one approach was creating a dungeon that fully utilized the physics. The second approach was to create a dungeon that gets affected by events in the dungeon –such as dynamic movements, changes in direction, and getting transferred to different locations. By having players discover a dungeon within these large beings, it links the story and gameplay, and that’s the kind of dungeon I wanted to create.
Nintendo: Ah, interesting. So how did this affect the new dungeon in The Champions’ Ballad?
Fujibayashi: Since the new dungeon was created with more ideas after we’ve created the four Divine Beast dungeons, I believe the dungeon added in DLC Pack 2 is the most fun and different among the dungeons we worked on.
Source: News (Nintendo Switch)