Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity staff on the game’s grass, took around half of the dev time to finish

A previous issue of Japanese magazine Nintendo Dream featured an interview with some of the core staff involved in the production of Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity where they spoke candidly about their experiences developing the game. The discussion included development producer Masaki Furusawa, director Ryouta Matsushita, producer Yousuke Hayashi, and art director Yuu Oohashi.

One of the team’s biggest challenges while developing the game is probably not something you’d expect – the grass. According to the staff, it took the team half of the development time to get it right and involved hundreds of people from departments all over Koei Tecmo.

Here’s our translation of that excerpt:

Is the scope of BotW’s Hyrule Field faithfully replicated in the game?

Matsushita: Initially the plan was to go with something a little different, but it ultimately ended up being quite a faithful reproduction. The atmosphere of BotW’s world really made its way onto the battlefield. With that said, there were also parts we inevitably had to change up as well.

It really gives the impression that even grass grows the same way.

Oohoshi: Yeah… That grass took ages!

(all laugh)

Furusawa: It was a real pain, wasn’t it?

Oohoshi: It took about half of development time to finishing touching up the grass in the game. We really struggled to recreate the atmosphere of Hyrule Field.

Furusawa: We had to reproduce the area in a way that would stun players.

Oohoshi: It’s the beginning of the game which is why it’s really something we wanted to focus on.

Furusawa: We asked the Zelda team at Nintendo how they made the grass in BotW and even though they shared everything down to the finer details of their methods, there was still uncertainty about whether we could reproduce it. The game has a lot of grass, so we also considered if there were other methods available to us.

Oohoshi: We experimented with a bunch of different options to make the grass stand out as one of the strong points of the game.

Matsushita: The whole company got dragged into the grass mess, didn’t they?

Oohoshi: How many hundreds of people was it? (laughs)

Matsushita: It’s no exaggeration to say we were in talks with development staff, CG departments, background and technical support the whole time.

Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity released worldwide for Switch on November 20, 2020.