Implementing Echoes Posed a Challenge for Echoes of Wisdom Developers

In a recent edition of Ask the Developer, Echoes of Wisdom developers shared insights into what it was like creating the game. Those interviewed include The Legend of Zelda Series Producer Eiji Aonuma, the Director for Echoes of Wisdom from Nintendo Tomomi Sano, and the Director from the Grezzo side of production Satoshi Terada. Grezzo is the company behind many Zelda remakes, including the 2019 version of Link’s Awakening.

In Part 2 of the interview, the developers spoke about the development of the Echoes used in the newest Zelda title. They discussed their approach in creating specific roles for each of the Echoes:

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.

Another matter they had to consider is how the Echoes would work from both top-down and side views:

 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.

With over 100 Echoes in the game, the developers had to consider many different scenarios that the players could imagine.

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 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.

Sano also addressed the concern of making sure the Echoes performed their specific function right away so gameplay would be intuitive for players. In fact, the “bind” ability was born out of a need to make intuitive gameplay:

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.

As can be imagined, coming up with both specific roles for Echoes and intuitive gameplay that allowed player freedom was no small feat. Terada and Aonuma discussed how at first they were concerned with following older styles of game development that restrained a lot at the beginning and let go as players progressed:

With not only echoes, but also the bind feature, it must have taken a lot of effort to make all of this work and realize 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.

I know when I first saw Echoes of Wisdom I thought it was perhaps more of a return to the older titles that had a narrower definition of what players are allowed to do and when. Instead, Echoes of Wisdom appears to grant players a lot of freedom up front and a lot of room for creativity. It will be fun to see how all 100 Echoes work within the game and how players solve the many challenges that await.

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom has now released and is available to play on Nintendo Switch.

Source: Nintendo

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