Breath Of The Wild Was Held Back By Wii U

With The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom dropping on May 12, Nintendo is trying again and sharing extra particulars about its predecessor, Breath of the Wild. Those particulars embody affirmation that the Wii U console held again the manufacturing of and content material included in BotW.

Read More: Can The Switch Handle Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom? Here’s What People Are Saying

As a part of the eighth era of consoles (alongside the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One), the Wii U was Nintendo’s first try at bridging the hole between on-the-go and at-home techniques. It wasn’t a hit. Yeah, it had some nice video games, together with Bayonetta 2, Splatoon, and Xenoblade Chronicles X, amongst others. But the confusion round how you can really use the console, coupled with the proximity with which the GamePad needed to be to the Wii U itself, made it cumbersome and irritating. Hell, I keep in mind when it was revealed throughout E3 2010 and people (myself included) thought it was some form of add-on for the Wii.

It wasn’t, however Nintendo actually didn’t do a ok job of making the case that this was a separate console clear. Now, over a decade after its launch, the Wii U has solely bought an estimated 15 million items up to now, a far cry from the over 100 million the Wii pushed and the Switch’s 122.5 million.

Despite some heavy-hitter titles like Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Maker, the Wii U was not the success Nintendo hoped it will be—or the success it’s used to. And though a number of the higher Wii U video games at the moment are on Nintendo Switch, the corporate’s house run handheld-console hybrid, Nintendo has admitted in a current interview that BotW would have benefitted from being a Switch unique all alongside.

Some BotW options wouldn’t work on Wii U

Five Nintendo builders, together with Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma, sat right down to reply some questions on Tears of the Kingdom in a multi-part interview. In the newest phase, revealed on the official Nintendo web site on May 10, the group was requested about how TotK has expanded in relation to its predecessor. Technical director Takuhiro Dohta defined that sure design parts couldn’t be applied because of {hardware} limitations.

“Actually, the previous title, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, was originally developed for Wii U, so there were restrictions in development,” Dohta stated. “There were a lot of ideas we wanted to implement during its development, but we made clear decisions on what we wouldn’t do in that game. For example, we decided that it wouldn’t involve flying. Then Aonuma kept saying, ‘If flying is out of the question, I want to dig underground!’ And we’d respond, ‘Oh no! Please don’t make us develop that too!’”

Now that TotK is a Nintendo Switch unique, although, these ideas left on the cutting-room flooring—like cliffside caves that ought to current new exploration alternatives—are making an look. This is basically as a result of the staff is reusing the BotW map to streamline growth.

“For The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, we began by compiling and implementing ideas we couldn’t include in the previous title,” Dohta stated. “We wouldn’t have been able to do so had we made a completely new world, so developing in the same setting as the previous game was significant in this sense as well.”

Read More: Catch-Up On Zelda: Breath Of The Wild Before The Sequel In Under Seven Minutes

Elsewhere within the interview, artwork director Satoru Takizawa confirmed that “traditional” Zelda dungeons are coming again as properly. Although we discovered this from the current TotK leaks, it appears they are going to be extra expansive than you noticed in Link’s final outing.

“Making a ‘wide variety’ was pretty challenging,” Takizawa stated. “The four Divine Beasts were the dungeons in [BotW], and they shared similar designs. This time, the dungeons are huge and each carry their own regional look and feel, just like traditional The Legend of Zelda games. We think they will provide a satisfying challenge for players. They were certainly a challenge to develop!”

Kotaku reached out to Nintendo for remark.

Tears of the Kingdom appears to be an enormous growth to Breath of the Wild, and never simply due to the sky island you may discover above The Great Plateau. With Link’s plethora of recent skills, such because the Fuse ability that al principally instantly responds to weapon sturdiness, it’ll be fascinating to see what different concepts Nintendo has in retailer when Link’s newest journey drops on May 12.