The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild stole the show at E3 2016 but news that the game had suffered a delay came as a disappointment, especially given the fact that the series celebrates its 30th anniversary this year.
Now, The Legend of Zelda series producer Eiji Aonuma has expanded on the reasoning behind their decision to do so, partly shouldering the blame for not being clear in his directions to the development team. Their continual experimentation broke aspects in a build of the game that he had been happy with, which therefore resulted in the delay.
“We have these milestones during development. I play the game, then give staff my comments, my advice on what direction they should be heading in,” Aonuma explained to EDGE. “At one of the milestones, the game was fantastic. There were so many great elements. But at the next milestone, that was all gone.
“I’d made a lot of comments about what they needed to add, but I never told them what I thought was good about the game at that milestone. So they added stuff that I’d recommended, but they also added some other elements they thought would work well – and that ended up breaking all the good parts of the previous build. I learned that, when it’s good, I have to say so. If I’d managed that well, maybe development wouldn’t have extended quite so much.”
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild will release exclusively for Nintendo NX and Wii U in 2017.
