The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom's producer and directors have revealed that during the early stages of the game's prototyping, the development team intended to allow players to create and share their own dungeons.
In a new Ask the Developer interview on Nintendo's website, legendary producer Eiji Aonuma, along with game directors Tomomi Sano and Satoshi Terada, answers questions about Echoes of Wisdom's design philosophy and development process.
In that interview, Aonuma says that he asked employees of Echoes of Wisdom developer Grezzo to pitch concepts for a new Zelda game, and that after receiving many pitches, the team settled on something "with a focus on copy-and-paste gameplay", as well as a mixed top-down and side-on view.
Terada says that Grezzo was "exploring a few different ways" Echoes of Wisdom could go gameplay-wise, and that one such idea allowed Link to "create original dungeons" by copying and pasting objects.
Aonuma follows up by saying that while it's "fun to create your own dungeon", he thought the gameplay idea could be shifted from creating dungeons to "using copied-and-pasted items as tools to further your own adventure".
At that point, Aonuma decided to "upend the tea table" and to change the idea of editing dungeons into a "new way of playing the Legend of Zelda games".
This refers back to a point Aonuma makes earlier in the interview; he says he and Nintendo worried that "fans may not continue playing [The Legend of Zelda] unless they can think independently" and solve puzzles using their own methods, rather than the classic set solutions of earlier Zelda games.
It's that philosophy that underpins Echoes of Wisdom's more Breath of the Wild-style open-ended approach to puzzles. Aonuma says the team needed to "increase the degree of freedom" inherent in Zelda's design philosophy in order to achieve a more free puzzle-solving approach.
Intriguingly, Aonuma also says he's "always wanted to establish a 2D top-down Legend of Zelda series" that stands apart from mainline Zelda entries. Could Echoes of Wisdom be the start of that new series? Let's hope so!
It's well worth reading the full interview with Aonuma, Terada, and Sano, as well as its second part, if you want to learn more about The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom ahead of its release later this week.
Echoes of Wisdom launches exclusively for Nintendo Switch on September 26th. You can take a look at our preview here to find out how this new, creative take on top-down Zelda shakes out.
