The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom once included Super Mario Maker-style gameplay, but for dungeons.
In a new Q&A with Nintendo, Echoes of Wisdom’s director Tomomi Sano (the first female director for the Zelda series), Satoshi Terada from the now-confirmed developer Grezzo and The Legend of Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma spoke more about how the upcoming release came to into being.
Grezzo was asked to pitch ideas for a new game – the team’s first all-new Zelda title. “We asked Grezzo, ‘If you were to make the next new game, what kind of game would you like it to be?’. We had the opportunity to hear ideas from members of Grezzo, which they came up with freely and proposed,” the producer said.
A large number of ideas were pitched to Nintendo, but Terada said the ideas were eventually narrowed down to “a focus on copy-and-paste gameplay and gameplay that combines top-down view and side view”. With these parameters set, Aonuma then asked the team to “think of ways to add some freedom” to the idea. And, this is when the dungeon-maker idea came to be.
“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,” Terada revealed. “During this exploration phase, this idea was called an ‘edit dungeon’ because players could create their own The Legend of Zelda gameplay.”
Aonuma then gave this edit dungeon concept a go, and agreed it was “fun to create your own dungeon and let other people play it”. However, the Zelda producer also thought this idea could be improved still.
“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,” he said. And this is how Echoes of Wisdom’s Echo mechanic began. “The gameplay was shifted from creating dungeons up until then to using copied-and-pasted items as tools to further your own adventure,” Aonuma shared.
According to Sano, it was “about a year since [Grezzo] started prototyping with the ‘edit dungeon’ idea” and those now titular echoes getting threaded into the development.
“Everyone else was developing the game with dungeon creation in mind, but I was right next to them thinking of something different. But there’s a reason it took a year to upend the tea table,” he said, evoking the classic Shigeru Miyamoto phrase. “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.”
Said Aonuma: “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.”
The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is set to debut later this week, on 26th September.
Our Tom has already been hands-on with the upcoming release, noting it “manages to still feel like a proper Zelda game – rather than being a more forgettable princess-led spin-off” in Eurogamer’s Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom preview.
