Miyamoto’s Thoughts on Open World

The 74th Annual general meeting of the shareholders was recently posted on the Official Nintendo of Japan site which includes many questions and answers about several upcoming titles and a few hints of what they have coming down the road. Among them are a few more mentions of the upcoming Legend of Zelda WiiU from series creator Shigeru Miyamoto. He does not want to reveal any more than what was said at E3 but he does go into greater detail on what he would like to include in the game when it comes to open world environment.

Jump inside to check it out for yourself.

” In addition, we have already announced that we are now developing the next title for the orthodox “The Legend of Zelda” series for Wii U, and that it will be an “open world,” as announced at E3. I prefer not to use the generally used term “open world” when developing software, but we used this term in order to make it easier for consumers to understand. This term means that there is a large world in which players can do numerous things daily. In the traditional “The Legend of Zelda” series, the player would play one dungeon at a time. For example, if there are eight dungeons, at the fourth dungeon, some players may think, “I’m already halfway through the game,” while other players may think, “I still have half of the game to play.” We are trying to gradually break down such mechanism and develop a game style in which you can enjoy “The Legend of Zelda” freely in a vast world, whenever you find the time to do so.

“At the halfway point to achieving this goal, we released “The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds” for Nintendo 3DS last year. We created the games in the traditional “The Legend of Zelda” series in steps that players could easily understand and follow; the player would obtain a new item in each dungeon, use the item to clear that dungeon and be able to enjoy applying the items in different ways after acquiring about eight items. However, in “The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds,” we broke that down and let the player rent different items from the beginning, so the player could use different combinations of items. In this way, we are gradually changing the structure of “The Legend of Zelda” series, and we are preparing to newly evolve the series for Wii U. In addition to that, we have ideas for Nintendo 3DS which we have not announced yet, so I hope you will look forward to them.”

you can see the complete interview here

I am glad to see that they are still maintaining the open world aspect of the early games in this next title. Especially since some of the more recent games give me a sense of being herded in a direction for at least the first half of the game. I would like to see more of a transition back to the original Legend of Zelda way of things where at the beginning a curious player really could wander to the corners if they tried hard enough.

Source: Nintendo of Japan