Although The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild arrives in 2017, the game was scheduled to debut in 2015, which reminds us that, in the history of the series, delays are common. Now Aonuma, producer of the franchise, and Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of Zelda, spoke about the continuation of the developments.
So, Aonuma mentioned that his intention with every new The Legend of Zelda is to launch as soon as possible, but the creative ambitions of Nintendo regularly generate delays.
“Every time we make a Zelda, we want to make something new,” said Aonuma to website Kotaku. “It’s hard to gauge how long that’s going to take. And it’s also hard to gauge at what point whatever we consider to be new is done.”
As you remember, Ocarina of Time was originally planned for 1997 but it came in 1998, Wind Waker debuted in 2003, when it was destined for 2012; Twilight Princess was moved from 2005 to 2006; and the most recent case is the Breath of the Wild, which was to be released in 2015, but it will come in 2017 for Wii U and NX.
But that was not all, because Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of The Legend of Zelda, also spoke about the delay of these games.
“I think there’s different reasons for delays,” he said. “One could be that the direction just hasn’t been decided, which is probably the worst kind of delay. And the other is that the direction has been decided but putting that into reality—implementing that—is taking time.”
Specifically for Breath of the Wild, Miyamoto said that Nintendo needed to make sure they had enough to work on its new physics engine, the behavior of AI and to improve graphics.
“We had to make sure that design has enough time to create that. It just dawned on us that we’re not able to do that in this schedule,” he said. “That’s what we realized about two years ago. In this instance, we never really experienced this, so that’s why we had to delay it.”
“First of all, it would be great if I didn’t have to put a release date out at all,” he continued. “But I have to do it”.
This reminds us of one of the most famous quotes of Miyamoto, which is related to the delays: “A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.”
Remember that The Legend of Zelda: Breath of Wild will debut in 2017 for Wii U and Nintendo NX.
