gamingeek said:

I hate Ellie Gibson because of her Endless Ocean reviews.

Well, no one's perfect.  At least Ellie Gibson had some credibility as a games journalist, no matter how contradictory that statement may be.

Miyamoto was holding everyone back. A new golden age is upon us!

Wired Aonuma Zelda interview:

He faced this demon with Skyward Sword, the last console title in the Zelda series. “A lot of the feedback that I received from the players of Skyward Sword is that they saw these pockets of land, but couldn’t explore what was between them,” he says. Players complained that it lacked the joy of exploration and discovery evoked by the Legend of Zelda, the game that started it all in 1986. Aonuma says that game’s 2-D bird’s-eye view made it easier to find and follow your path. “But in 3-D, all of a sudden, you might come across a wall or something that you can’t get past,” he says.

The solution to that problem defined the design of Breath of the Wild and the terrain players explore. “Link can climb up high and look down from cliffs,” Aonuma says. “It’s kind of like 2-D gameplay.” The demo’s opening scene shows Link running to the edge of a high cliff and surveying the world beyond. This harkens back to a beloved illustration from the game manual of the original Zelda, and it provides an insight into the gameplay: You can always climb something to get a sense of where you are and where you ought to go.

Climbing

The first of the two Zelda demos encourages you to explore a vast area that Nintendo says represents just one percent of the gameworld. Climbing and running deplete Link’s stamina meter, requiring brief rests after a short sprint or climbs. I decided to raid a monster camp and found treasure and weapons. This is important, because weapons degrade with use. You’re constantly on the lookout for new bows, spears, clubs, and what have you.

I died in a fall while running up a cliffside trying to push a boulder onto enemies. I revived among those enemies, defeated them, and found a treasure chest containing a Fire Rod—a magnificent weapon that shoots big, bouncing balls of fire, Mario-like, starting huge fires in the dry grass.

Eiji Aonuma (L) and Shigeru Miyamoto (R) at Nintendo’s E3 booth.Business Wire

The second demo is a bit more structured. It features scenes from the beginning of the game. Link awakes in some kind of mysterious water-bath stasis chamber, like a Precog in Minority Report but wearing boxer briefs. (Many people have, upon seeing this, promised to keep Link nearly nude for the entire game. “Please try it,” Aonuma says.) You soon find clothes, which you can swap throughout the game to increase your defensive capabilities.

Once clothed (or not), you meet a mysterious old man in another callback to the first Zelda, which started with Link coming across an old man who gave him a sword. The fellow sends you on the first storyline missions.

At this point, I understood why Nintendo offered two demos, in this order. It wants players to get a sense of the storyline without holding their hands so tightly they lose sight of the fact this is a new kind of Zelda, one that no longer requires slavishly going from story beat to story beat. You can ignore the old man if you want.

Under the Eyes of “God”

Breath of the Wild is the first console Zelda since creator Shigeru Miyamoto relinquished day-to-day development duties. “I’m actually the one who was the most affected by Miyamoto taking a step back, because now I have to take on all the responsibilities of Zelda,” Aonuma says. “I thought, hey, this is my chance to create something I really want to create!”

They'll always question: 'Well, what would Miyamoto say?' Eiji Aonuma

That doesn’t mean Miyamoto is gone, however. To the development team, “Miyamoto is God,” Aonuma says. “So even when I say, hey, this is what I think should be done, they’ll always question: ‘Well, what would Miyamoto say?’” In that sense, the team wanted to create something Miyamoto will enjoy. “Up until about two years ago, Miyamoto actually had a lot of comments and advice about Breath of the Wild.” Those comments shaped some elements of the game.

At about the same time, Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata instructed Miyamoto to create games that capitalize on the Wii U’s unique GamePad controller, with its motion controls and touchscreen. The first of them, Star Fox Zero, featured dual-screen gameplay that confused players. The developers tried the dual screen approach with Zelda, but rejected it.

Nintendo

“We realized that having something on the GamePad and looking back and forth between the TV screen and the GamePad actually disrupts the gameplay, and the concentration that the game player may be experiencing,” Aonuma said. “You have your car’s GPS system on your dash. If you had it down in your lap, you’re going to get into an accident!” Still, you can play the game entirely on the GamePad screen, if you like. Considering how vast the world is, it would keep you from monopolizing the TV.

It’s a safe bet that Aounuma favored single-screen gameplay with a standard gaming controller because Nintendo is bringing Breath of the Wild to NX, its next console. The two games will play identically. “I’m not going to create something where the users are going to have a different experience,” he says. (And now you know NX will support a standard buttons-and-sticks gameplay style, and you won’t be using some crazy contraption.)

A Wild New Nintendo?

Breath of the Wild is a new direction for Zelda, but the gameplay is familiar and brings a decidedly Nintendo-like twist to the popular “open world” genre. Aonuma recruited “a different set of programmers than I’ve worked with in the past. This is a group of people who have studied triple-A games, and researched and dissected what kind of elements we can add to Nintendo games to create experiences like that.”

I think you’ll start to see different types of games in the future. Eiji Aonuma

In other words, Nintendo is studying where others succeed, deconstructing those games down, and reassembling those elements in a game immediately recognizable as a Nintendo title. Their work will shape games beyond Zelda. “Because of all the efforts that they’ve put in, we were able to create a new base,” Aonuma says, “so I think you’ll start to see different types of games in the future.”

Business Wire

This is an intriguing idea and a bold experiment. If it succeeds, Breath of the Wild will mark the start of a new journey for the company, one that sees a new team, a new Zelda and perhaps even a new Nintendo unconstrained by the boundaries of its past.

That different team has got to be Monolithsoft. Because we know they have worked with Zelda before on Skyward sword for instance, we know that they were the ones who said that they had been experimenting with HD development for years before XCX. And the tech and XCX engine would allow BOTW to exist as it does at that size and scope which is just a tad smaller than XCX.

So thank Monolithsoft for open world Zelda.

gamingeek said:

So thank Monolithsoft for open world Zelda.

And thank Squaresoft for not treating these guys like gold back in the day.

Dvader said:

Miyamoto was holding everyone back. A new golden age is upon us!

He really was though. EVERYTHING  had to be the Miyamoto way, you saw plenty of developers and publishers complaining about it over the years...that Nintendo always relied on the words and wants of ONE guy.

gamingeek said:

GAF

"The wired interview with aonuma is really interesting, it seems like he recruited a group of programmers who studied a lot of AAA games and how nintendo could make these games and incorporate their ideas on it. He says that we will see a lot of new games following this path."

I guess the complainers got what they asked for.

Great news if true...its smart to give people what they want and go directions that people want to see. If only they larned this sooner.

gamingeek said:

Aonuma said:

This is definitely the first time we’ve created a game this large. We didn’t know where to start. So it happened to be there was a team that was working on creating a larger world. And this team was a group of younger developers. So we had our old programmers from the Zelda team take a step aside, so we could introduce this new group of programmers. But then these new, younger developers had no clue about how past Zeldas had been created. The group of new staff actually would ask us, like ‘Well I know that it’s been done, traditionally, in other Zelda titles, but why does it have to be that way?’ And among those questions there were some I just couldn’t answer, that I didn’t know the answer to myself. That was because I just took those things on as a tradition, and I didn’t really know why the tradition existed. When you think about it, maybe those things really didn’t need to be there in the modern world, those traditions. So I started destroying these traditions I’d inherited in the series one by one. But it’s a process that takes a lot of time. And because we were destroying everything we’d done in the past, and rebuild new ideas from the ground up, that was the hardest thing, and it’s really taken a long time to create the thing I most wanted to create

Along with Splatoon and the staff changes, Miyamoto stepping back etc. It really sounds like Nintendo is going through a process of moving towards a new generation of developers. Exciting times because they still got the old masters on hand to help.

They're setting themselves up for continued success much better than SEGA did for when they go 3rd-party. Its great to see.

gamingeek said:

She's also a lesbian BTW.

I don't mind, even it means I can only watch. Let it wash over you!

Archangel3371 said:

I don't mind, even it means I can only watch. Let it wash over you!

Let them scissor on a clear glass table while we watch from down below!

edgecrusher said:

Let them scissor on a clear glass table while we watch from down below!

Mmmmmm, delicious!

Edgecrusher said:

He really was though. EVERYTHING  had to be the Miyamoto way, you saw plenty of developers and publishers complaining about it over the years...that Nintendo always relied on the words and wants of ONE guy.

Nintendo developers? Yeah a little but most of the time they say that his "guidance" has been helpful and led to a better game and focus in the end.

Publishers as in 3rd party publishers? I don't see, hear or get why 3rd party publishers would be complaining about 1st party Nintendo development processes?

Miyamoto seemed to just blurt out random sentances that people took as law as far as I could see. Like "Make metroid prime 1st person" then he drops the mic and walks away like Antonio Banderas in Desperado.

Anyway, as we know he and Takeda are now fellows and dont get to decide what games are made anymore. And of course Iwata had a huge say over what got made, not anymore. I wonder if we'll ever seen open world Mario or Metroid? Maybe Nintendo will go the Ubisoft way, everything open world like XCX.

I wouldn't have minded a Lego City style game made with the Mario Licence.

Archangel3371 said:

I don't mind, even it means I can only watch. Let it wash over you!

I dont want anything to wash over me, thanks.

View on YouTube

Super Mario Sunshine 2 soundtrack should be this!