Keeping up with the latest bit of Zelda News, we’re going to be talking about Zelda Wii U.
In a recent interview with GameInformer, Shigeru Miyamoto stated that the development on Zelda Wii U is progressing quite well.
We’re also working on a new Wii U Zelda game. That’s coming along; work on that is progressing fairly concretely. In fact, we were thinking of showing it here at E3 but decided to wait just a little bit longer before showing it to everyone.
Not much is known about Zelda Wii U yet, but we may possibly see it in a Nintendo Direct sometime in the future.
Zeldathon, a group of people who play Legend of Zelda games for causes is currently raising money for the National Foundation of Transplants. Right now, as I write this, they are playing through Four Sword Adventures and have reached the Village of the Blue Maiden.
Watch the video after the jump and be sure to donate to them.
Remember when we used to play The Wind Waker when it first came out? Sailing from Dragon Roost Island to Forest Haven took forever. Not only that, but gathering sunken treasure, like the ones for the Triforce Shards, would sometimes take forever to pull up from under the water.
Luckily for us, the Zelda Team has fixed both issues and added new things to the game. As Shigeru Miyamoto has explained:
Well we’ve actually made a number of different improvements. I think the previous game, the length and the player pacing of it was something we thought we could improve on. For example, this time we’ve added an additional sail, that allows the boat to travel faster this time than it did in the original GameCube game. And when you’re dropping your crane down in the ocean to hunt for sunken treasure, the length of the chain on the crane is shorter so you spend less time on that. So it basically helps to speed up the gameplay a little bit. So the pacing has really been improved upon.
Eiji Aonuma recently stated in his interview with Wired that his team had tried to port Skyward Sword and Twilight Princess into the Nintendo Wii U to test how they would look in HD. After they noticed how the two games looked on the Nintendo Wii U, they ported The Wind Waker to the Nintendo Wii U and saw a massive difference between it and the games that came after it.
“We tried converting other console games to Wii U. We actually did this with Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword. And the result of that was, hmm, those are semi-realistic representations of the Zelda world so we weren’t really surprised with what we got. But with Wind Waker, when we converted that to HD we were really surprised at how great it looked.”
“We actually started thinking, maybe it was too soon to create that graphic style with the GameCube because of the limitations of the hardware. And we’re finding that we’re able to do what we wanted to do: The vision that we had then was being created thanks to the system specs and the HD graphics.
“It feels like we’re really able to create the complete Wind Waker experience on Wii U. In addition to the graphics, we’ve also got the GamePad and there’s lots of other pluses that we’re finding in converting to the Wii U system.”
The Wind Waker HD will be coming out in October. Are you ready for it?
Recently, Wired.com was able to have a personal interview with the developer of the Legend of Zelda series, Eiji Aonuma. In their interview with him, they asked him about multiplayer, The Wind Waker HD, and even the unreleased Zelda Wii U. Below is some part of the interview they conducted with Eiji Aonuma.
Wired: You’ve said you’re working on, past Wind Waker, an all-new Zelda game for Wii U. I know it’s very early in development, but I’m curious if you can give us any idea about what it is you’re thinking about as far as how to use the features of Wii U in a Zelda that’s made entirely for that platform.
Aonuma: That’s actually a really hard question to answer, because if I put it into words it might be misunderstood at this point. Wind Waker is kind of a test pattern for the team. In converting Wind Waker, there’s a lot to be learned. We can’t change too much, because in changing one thing you can break something else, which is not something we want to do. But it’s a shared team working on both of those projects, Wind Waker HD and the new Zelda for Wii U. Every day, they’re learning something new. As we develop the controls for Wind Waker, they’re learning how to apply those controls in the Wii U version. There’s a feedback process where when something’s discovered in development for Wind Waker, all that information is fed to the Wii U team. So we’re working on those things, polishing as we go, and all of those things — it’s a learning process, it’s a test case almost, and we’ll apply all of those learnings that we’ve acquired in developing the Wii U game.
Along with the news that Zelda Wii U will draw inspiration from Skyrim and well as may feature downloadable content (DLC), Eiji Aonuma has stated that the newest Legend of Zelda title will include a whole new and unique art style. Fans who were wondering if Zelda Wii U would follow in the steps of Twilight Princess can now finally be put at ease knowing that Zelda Wii U will have a brand new style.
The new style will not have the realistic style as seen in Twilight Princess, but it won’t also be cartoony in style, like The Wind Waker. It also will be a unique style, so it may branch off of Skyward Sword‘s style in some sort of way. Either way, the game will not look like any other Zelda game in the series, says Eiji Aonuma.
“The thing about Zelda is we want everything to be unique, whether it’s the graphical presentation or the gameplay.”
“It has to be something you can’t see anywhere else. We wouldn’t want it to be ultra-realistic because you can see that elsewhere. But I can’t say that it’s going to be cartoony-realistic like you mentioned, the fantastic presentation that we’ve already done in the past. It will be something new.”
Eiji Aonuma was recently interviewed by Engadget about the Legend of Zelda series and it’s future. In the interview, Eiji Aonuma stated that if the Legend of Zelda team kept making remakes of games, they wouldn’t grow in knowledge. Remaking The Wind Waker was the first step to completely understanding the Nintendo Wii U console; the knowledge they gained from making the game from the ground up would now help in finishing Zelda Wii U.
As for news on the Legend of Zelda Wii U game, the Eiji Aonuma did say they are hard at work working on the newest title, but have said that they have nothing worthwhile to show about the game.
The latest installment to the Legend of Zelda series, A Link Between Worlds, has been recently been given a release date of November for the Americas. As for Europe, Nintendo has stated that A Link Between Worlds would be released some time later this year, possibly sometime before Christmas.
We do suggest that you bookmark our A Link Between Worlds walkthrough page. As we get closer to the release date of A Link Between Worlds, Zelda Sanctuary will be covering details about A Link Between Worlds in order to assist you in collecting everything in the game.
In an interview with Eiji Aonuma, Daniel Vuckovic, an Australian gaming editor, has found out that The Wind Waker HD will not be including any of the missing dungeons or islands in the game that were found in the concept art within Hyrule Historia. As well Eiji Aonuma stated that they didn’t include a hard mode within the game, leaving the game to be a merely HD experience outside faster sailing and the Tingle Tuner being turned into the Tingle Bottle.
Be sure to bookmark Zelda Sanctuary to learn all the greatest Legend of Zelda news!
During a recent Miiverse Nintendo Direct, Eiji Aonuma had commented on the sequel to A Link to the Past, which, in Japan, is called A Link to the Past 2.
“The world of Hyrule has been reborn in a highly realistic stereoscopic vision, which will feature a new story and new puzzles to be solved. The development for the successor of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is going smoothly, so, please look forward to it! The day we’ll be seeing the successor is still further ahead, but for those of you who wish to contribute or show your support, please comment on the Wii U The Legend of Zelda series community [on Miiverse].” - Eiji Aonuma
The idea for the game has been played around with for several years. It also mentions that A Link to the Past 2 has been in development since 2011.
