Changes made to The Wind Waker HD due to fan reaction

Information about the upcoming The Wind Waker HD has been tricking in a lot more often lately. Well Aonuma is back with a new interview on Polygon where he tells fans just a little bit more about the long awaited remake. In this he shares his concerns about making too many changes to the original game and how it might upset fans. He states how he saw the negative reaction from fans after showing images in a Nintendo Direct presentation and made a few changes based on that reaction.

Jump inside to check it out for yourself.

“That’s something I’m very concerned about, I’m always thinking about,” he told Polygon in a recent interview. “With Wind Waker HD the first thing we did was release a still during a Nintendo Direct presentation and there were quite a few fans who said, ‘That’s not my Wind Waker.’ They said it looked different from the Wind Waker they’ve experienced.

“It is certainly a bit of a balancing act,” he said. “I too was one of those Star Wars fans who saw the HD Star Wars and was a little bit disappointed because it wasn’t my Star Wars. I understand those feelings and I understand the possibility of it happening. So it’s something we’re aware of.”

“Certainly I understand even those areas of the game that weren’t optimized could be associated with very fond memories for people who played the game originally, but I wanted to make those adjustments to really optimize the experience for all players, including new players,” he said. “Hopefully there will be a lot of new players who will pick up the game for the first time and I wanted to make sure that this was optimized for them.”

“When we were thinking about the new Zelda for Wii U, which is something we’re actually working on, we needed to experiment with a variety of graphic styles and it was part of that process we took some existing Zelda games and made them HD just to see what would happen,” he said. “In doing so we realized that the Wind Waker graphic style, the art style, really represented well on the Wii U given the graphic capabilities of the new system. It really brought that world to life. On top of the graphic representation of this world, we were able to tighten those areas I was mentioning before, I really felt like it could breathe new life into this already existing space, this already existing experience.”

And, Aonuma said, the process of creating this remastered Wind Waker also helped the team learn some things they hope to apply to the new Zelda game.

You can read the complete article here.

I think that this is such a rare and interesting event when a developer actually takes a good look at the fan reaction and then works to improve the game based on that. I think in a lot of situations that would not have happened. And again no new information on that mysterious upcoming WiiU Zelda. One day they are going to slip up and make a mention in one of these interviews.

Source: Polygon