Ask the Developer Vol. 13, The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom – Chapter 2

Some of the images and videos shown in text were created during development.

This article has been translated from the original Japanese content.

• Chapter 1: Twice as satisfying

• Chapter 2: Being mischievous

• Chapter 3: Princess Zelda is on her own adventure

• Chapter 4: That authentic "Legend of Zelda-like" feeling

Chapter 2: Being mischievous

It sounds like you can create echoes of lots of different things in this game. How did you approach creating roles for each of them? Did you set any kind of rules when coming up with ideas?

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.

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.

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.

You also had to consider the top-down view and side-view perspectives when developing the echoes gameplay too.

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)

Terada:
It certainly was...a challenge. (Laughs)

Everyone:
(Laughs)

Terada:
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.

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.

Even just for one single echo, there are so many different scenarios you need to account for, and there are over 100 echoes in the game, right?

Terada:
Exactly. 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.

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.

Indeed, there wouldn't be much point in having so many echoes if you couldn't make use of them.

Sano:
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.

Aonuma:
Speaking of which, didn't the "bind" ability also come from the feeling of excitement that comes with moving things intuitively?

What kind of feature is "bind"?

Sano:
It's an ability that lets you bind with an object to have it copy your movements. Conversely, you can also bind yourself to an object to mirror its movements in the same way.

Aonuma:
There's a trick to moving things you're bound to, and this is one of the action elements of the game.

With not only echoes, but also the bind feature, it must have taken a lot of effort to make all of this work and realise the number of possibilities without breaking the gameplay.

Terada:
It did. At the beginning of the game's development, we were thinking a lot about restrictions on gameplay, assuming that certain things would definitely break the game mechanics or stop the game from working properly. We had ideas like being limited to using only 20 echoes in a dungeon. Lots of ideas like these made it so you couldn't do things you had previously done.

But it would have been frustrating for players if they couldn't use a solution that worked in a previous situation. So one day, we decided to scrap that approach and not impose any restrictions.

Aonuma:
I used to believe that the theory behind games was that being set loose from restraints gives a feeling of freedom and growth. That's why old games were designed to slowly lift the restrictions that were there at the start. For a long time, game developers like ourselves have made games while firmly believing this theory to be right, and we felt safe creating restrictions in line with it.

However, the echoes gameplay could fly in the face of this theory at times. When you're actually playing, it can be more fun not having the restrictions in the first place. And so we asked ourselves, "What do we want to do about this one?", "Shall we remove it?", and then gradually began removing those restrictions.

Over time, most of the restrictions we thought were necessary at the start of development were no longer needed. It even led us to allow things that we worried at first would provide too much freedom.

It's strange, isn't it? It's almost as if introducing some freedom attracted even more freedom.

So by removing the restrictions you'd put in place, the game became something with an extremely high level of freedom as a result. In other words, the right balance came together over the course of development.

Terada:
Speaking of which, there was also a key phrase we used during development: "being mischievous".

"Being mischievous"?

Aonuma:
We came up with this key phrase because we wanted to do some things that were really out there. For example, if you roll something like a spike roller along the ground, that's a lot of work, because it can hit all kinds of things, but if we didn't allow for this possibility, it wouldn't be fun. (Laughs) The development team called these kinds of ideas "being mischievous".

Sano:
We created a document explaining what "being mischievous" meant so that everyone could return to this concept if they weren't sure how to proceed.

Terada:
There were three rules: "Be able to paste things however, wherever, and whenever you like". "Make it possible to complete puzzles using things that aren't there".

Sano:
And third, "Being able to find uses for echoes that are so ingenious it almost feels like cheating should be part of what makes this game fun".

Oh, there's a small note written in the document about remembering the Myahm Agana Shrine from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (9).

(9) The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, a Nintendo Switch and Wii U game released in March 2017. Awakening from a 100-year slumber, the protagonist, Link, must explore and survive the vast and dangerous land of Hyrule to regain his memories.

Sano:
Ah, yes. In this shrine, you have to guide a ball across a board with obstacles to reach the goal. However, before the ball drops onto the board, you can flip the entire board over and use the obstacle-free surface on the other side to complete this challenge with ease.

Footage from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild for Nintendo Switch.

Terada:
It just slides effortlessly into the goal. (Laughs)

Aonuma:
It's like finding a secret trick in the game, just like the old days... If this kind of solution isn't allowed, then it's not fun.

Also, when developing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (10), we talked about how the player can kind of "cheat" in many places. I'm always really happy when I manage to solve something in an unexpected way, doing something where I'm not sure if it's even okay to do it like that. I guess it ties in with the idea of "being mischievous".

(10) The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, a Nintendo Switch game released in May 2023. It takes place after the story of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and is set in the same world. The title explores a vast environment across the land and skies of Hyrule. Players can pick up, move, and fuse together many objects to create things like vehicles and weapons.

Sano:
To achieve this sense of "being mischievous", we developed the game with the goal of not placing restrictions on players, or keeping restrictions to a level where they don't get in the way of the player's experience.

Indeed. When we discussed The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, we talked about how you wanted players to come up with their own solutions. It sounds like we can expect the same from this game too.