Aonuma wants to rethink/reconstruct puzzle-solving in Zelda Wii U
It’s sounding like there’s a lot that will be changed in The Legend of Zelda for Wii U. After all, the development team has been trying to rethink some of the series’ conventions.
One of Zelda Wii U’s changes seems to involve puzzles. Producer Eiji Aonuma, speaking with Kotaku, said, “I wanna kinda rethink or maybe reconstruct the idea of puzzle-solving within the Zelda universe.”
Check out the following exchange between Kotaku and Aonuma:
Schreier: I just have to slip in one question that a lot of people are wondering—Mr. Aonuma, you’ve talked a lot about changing traditions and shifting away from the series formulas. Can you give me one example of a tradition that people are familiar with in Zelda that you’ve changed in a big way for the new Zelda that you’re working on for next year?
Aonuma: So you know we’ve talked a little bit today about the puzzle-solving element in Zelda, and how that’s kinda taken a different shape in Hyrule Warriors. But I think people have come to just assume that puzzle-solving will exist in a Zelda game, and I kinda wanna change that, maybe turn it on its ear.
As a player progresses through any game, they’re making choices. They’re making hopefully logical choices to progress them in the game. And when I hear ‘puzzle solving’ I think of like moving blocks so that a door opens or something like that. But I feel like making those logical choices and taking information that you received previously and making decisions based on that can also be a sort of puzzle-solving. So I wanna kinda rethink or maybe reconstruct the idea of puzzle-solving within the Zelda universe.
