Nintendo on Their Evolving Approach to HD Development

After the announcement of Zelda WiiU’s delay, there have been many different reactions. No matter what your reaction, it’s hard not to appreciate the sheer honesty from Nintendo about why they felt they needed more time with the first true HD Zelda title. With Nintendo being a company that has historically focused on gameplay first, story second, and graphics last, it’s not hard to imagine the growing pains they must be experiencing during this process. Nintendo EAD general manager Katsuya Eguchi has given us some insight on what those growing pains actually look like and how their focus is still on providing top quality games upon release.

Hit the jump to find out more!

In an interview with EDGE, Katsuya Eguchi talks about the difficulties of the larger staff required for HD programming. We as gamers sometimes forget that with greater graphics comes greater man-power and money to make it all happen. We easily look at other companies and how long they have been living the HD dream but fail to fully examine the large gap between the end result.  While games on other system have been in HD for years, the reviews, ratings, and response to those games are often much lower then the top quality of Nintendo games.  I think this is simply because they have always had a commitment to making a game be the best that it can be, no matter the cost. While some companies rush releases and have to deal with a lot of bugs, Nintendo rarely has any issues after release. Below are some comments from Katsuya Eguchi on just how much is changing to get their HD team up to par with the rest of their high quality requirements.

“As you say, HD development tends to need a lot more people due to the higher standards required,” Eguchi began in his response to EDGE in their latest issue. “The question of how to secure the necessary programmers and designers is one common to all companies in the industry, and everyone has to find ways of dealing with it. For example, if you increase the number of staff, there will be a greater difference in skill levels between them, which makes managing quality control extremely important.”

“However, what’s really critical is making sure that this increased number of staff aren’t doing any unnecessary work. It hurts to imagine just how many people’s work would be wasted if we had to redo something. Being able to judge what needs to be done is the key to making sure that people and time are not wasted. This applies not only to decisions about specific features after development has started, but also to the starting point itself – what kind of new game to make, for example. That is critical, and getting it wrong runs the risk of the whole project amounting to nothing.”

Are you happy to see Nintendo take extra time to make the best quality HD games they can? Do you prefer earlier releases with bugs and patches as opposed to waiting for a more polished game? Let us know in the comments below what you prefer!

Source: Nintendo Insider