Nintendo Reveals Wii U Presented ‘Restrictions’ in Development of Breath of the Wild

Ahead of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom release, Nintendo has revealed that the Wii U actually held back the development of the game’s predecessor Breath of the Wild. Several Nintendo developers sat for the company’s recent “Ask the Developer” interview series where they revealed the ‘restrictions’ from Wii U.

It was mainly the hardware limitations of the Wii U which prevented developers from implementing some design and gameplay. “Actually, the previous title, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, was originally developed for Wii U, so there were restrictions in development,” Dohta said technical director Takuhiro Dohta during the interview.

He added, “There were a lot of ideas we wanted to implement during its development, but we made clear decisions on what we wouldn’t do in that game. For example, we decided that it wouldn’t involve flying. Then Aonuma kept saying, ‘If flying is out of the question, I want to dig underground!’ And we’d respond, ‘Oh no! Please don’t make us develop that too!’”

Dohta also revealed that the developers actually made a list of ideas for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom that they couldn’t implement in the previous game. “For The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, we began by compiling and implementing ideas we couldn’t include in the previous title. We wouldn’t have been able to do so had we made a completely new world, so developing in the same setting as the previous game was significant in this sense as well.”

Dungeons in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Another thing about The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was the absence of dungeons. Players were disappointed to see them replaced by Divine Beasts. But Nintendo has just confirmed that there will be dungeons in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. The game developers were asked during that episode about dungeons in the game. That’s when the developers confirmed that there will be dungeons in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

Tears of the Kingdom director Hidemaro Fujibayashi said, “Yes, we haven’t talked about the dungeons yet. They’ve changed from the previous game. For example, there is a dungeon that connects directly from Hyrule’s surface. If you dive from the sky straight into the dungeon, you’ll trigger an event. We think this will be a new experience that wasn’t possible in the previous game”.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom technical director Takuhiro Doht added to this by saying that “we’ve made dungeons unique to their respective environments, so we think you’ll be able to enjoy the wide variety of regional characteristics”.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom releases today May 12 for Nintendo Switch.