Aonuma: Nintendo will be “a bit more careful” choosing Zelda art styles in the future
Posted on 10 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in General Nintendo, News | 5 Comments
Nintendo tends to make use of various art styles with the Zelda games. We’ve seen approaches that have been realistic, cel-shaded, and even impressionistic.
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker most definitely introduced the biggest change in the series. No one saw the cartoon-like visuals coming, and the style initially caused quite the uproar. It’s in part due to Wind Waker’s original reception that it seems as though Nintendo will be more cautious with art styles in future Zeldas.
Eiji Aonuma, speaking with GamesTM this month, said the development team “will be a bit more careful in the future” with regard to the visual direction of Zelda entries. That being said, Aonuma would be willing “to break new ground again” if an approach was created that would appeal to the developers and players.
Aonuma told the magazine:
“We encountered an awful lot of problems from the drastic leap we took with Wind Waker. I think we will be a bit more careful in the future, but if we find a new approach that not just the developers, but also the users would enjoy then I think we will want to break new ground again. But we haven’t found such an approach yet.”
Thanks to joclo for sending this our way.
More: Eiji Aonuma, interview, The Legend of Zelda, top
Getting Wii Sports Club online was “a brand new challenge” due to the complexity of gyroscopes vs. buttons
Posted on 10 years ago by Austin(@NE_Austin) in News, Wii U, Wii U eShop | 3 Comments
The following is an excerpt from the latest round of Iwata Asks about the development of Wii Sports Club. Specifically, these quotes relate to the game’s online functionality (Miiverse included) and how the team (including folks from Namco Bandai, who helped the game along) tackled various issues that they came across:
“When we thought about how we want people to have fun with Wii Sports on the new hardware, the Wii U console, there was no way, given the expectations, that we couldn’t prepare online gaming. So as we began development, we set online gameplay of Tennis — the representative sport of Wii Sports — as our first goal. [We wanted to] pour our energy into how we could make [online gaming] fun.”
“In a typical online game, the information of the button presses are sent to your opponent, and the inputs are synchronized between the players, but for this game you have to send complex information from the gyro sensor and accelerometer of the Wii Remote Plus controllers, in addition to information from the buttons, which was a brand new challenge.”
– Nintendo EAD Takayuki Shimamura
Specifically regarding Miiverse:
“So we thought about how [Miiverse] should work. But if we were to simply implement Miiverse to a sporting game, the winners would probably write cheerful comments like ‘Yay! I won!’ But I bet the losers would hardly write anything at all, like ‘Oh I’m so frustrated I lost.’ We were concerned that Miiverse would become a cruel place. We also thought many people who play Wii Sports would have never played competitive games online.”
“Everyone has a hometown or someplace where they live, so we thought about setting it up in a way as if at first you join the sports club in the area where you live, and if we made sports clubs for the various states and provinces, each of the regions could compete.”
– Nintendo EAD Takayuki Shimamura
More: interview, Iwata Asks, top, Wii Sports (series)
Reggie talks using mobile devices for marketing, Nintendo TVii will see continued updates, more
Posted on 10 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in General Nintendo, News, Wii U | 3 Comments
Nintendo doesn’t plan on putting any of its franchises on smartphones. However, that doesn’t mean the company is opposed to the use of such devices entirely.
Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime, speaking with CNET, spoke about how Nintendo is consistently considering the mobile space from a marketing perspective. He also pointed out the importance of exclusive IPs like Mario and Zelda so that consumers understand they can only experience these series by picking up Nintendo hardware.
“We’re constantly thinking about how to leverage mobile as a marketing vehicle. How do I give little tastes of content, little experiences that then drive the consumer back to my hardware environment?”
“That’s why we’re so focused on having content exclusive to our platform. When the consumer wants to play Mario, Zelda, and Pokemon, they have to purchase our hardware to do so. And that preserves our overall financial model.”
