Nintendo Developer Hidemaro Fujibayashi has explained at the Game Developers Conference why the once implemented for Wii U touch screen features of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild were removed in the course of the development process.
In his opinion, this had greatly improved the player’s experience.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is scheduled to be released on March 3, 2017, and is actually well done, as the test reveals.
However, as with all games, there are also some elements in Nintendo’s latest, which have been changed over the long development period or even completely canceled.
These include the touch screen features that were still available in 2014 when the game was officially still exclusive to the Wii U.
At the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, senior developer Hidemaro Fujibayashi told IGN why the feature was deleted.
“When we developed the game for the Wii U, we had implemented touch features as you saw,” Fujibayashi said. “When we started to develop the game for Nintendo Switch, we wanted to offer the same player experience on both Wii U and Switch.”
In the test process on the new Nintendo console, however, one should have clearly crystallized: “When we tested the game without touch features, we noticed that the back and forth looking between gamepad and screen of this kind Zelda game actually hurts something,” explained Fujibayashi.
As a consequence, the function was deleted – with success.
“Without the touch features, it has actually turned into a really strong player experience. After further experiments and tests, we found that this is the best way to experience the game, “Fujibayashi continued.
Therefore, it did not hurt in the least to remove the already elaborated functions again.
