Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom originally let players make their own dungeons

In a new interview ahead of this week’s launch for The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom on Switch, the developers revealed that the game was originally being made to let players create their own dungeons. Eventually this morphed into echoes featured in the final product.

We get to hear from Grezzo director Satoshi Terada, Nintendo director Tomomi Sano, and series producer Eiji Aonuma here. The group started off by sharing the following:

Terada: We were exploring a few different ways to play the game in parallel. In one approach, Link could copy and paste various objects, such as doors and candlesticks, to create original dungeons. During this exploration phase, this idea was called an “edit dungeon” because players could create their own The Legend of Zelda gameplay.

Aonuma: They showed it to me and told me to give it a try. As I played, I started thinking that while it’s fun to create your own dungeon and let other people play it, it’s also not so bad to place items that can be copied and pasted in the game field, and create gameplay where they can be used to fight enemies.

That was the beginning of gameplay using “echoes”. The gameplay was shifted from creating dungeons up until then to using copied-and-pasted items as tools to further your own adventure.

The interview went on to reveal that the “edit dungeon” idea was prototyped for roughly a year. That’s when Aonuma upended the tea table, believing that echoes would be a better fit. He explained:

“Everyone else was developing the game with dungeon creation in mind, but I was right next to them thinking of something different. (Laughs) But there’s a reason it took a year to upend the tea table. After all, you can’t really see the potential for ideas to develop into solid gameplay until you can verify features and their feel, so I wanted them to try making it first.

I felt that the “edit dungeon” feature they showed me had significant potential to be developed into a new way of playing The Legend of Zelda games if the gameplay was changed to use “echoes” instead. So I thought it would be good to expand in that direction and could be even more interesting that way.”

Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom arrives for Switch on September 26, and we’ve got more coverage here. You can also find the full interview here.