Sunday, August 14, 2016

Scary Night

The night is dark and full of terrors...

But not in The Legend of Zelda, thanks to Eiji Aonuma. This is what he had to say about the light night in Breath of the Wild in an interview with EDGE (source):

"We didn't want to create something that was dark and scary. I've been up a tall mountain at night and seen the stars; it was completely dark, but the starlight made it brighter. I wanted our nighttime environment to be something like that. And when it's dark, there are elements in the environment that glow, so the player can use those to find their way."

Well, that feeling of wandering under a bright moonlight sky is something that almost all 3D Zelda games offer. I remember, how I was disappointed about the bright night in Twilight Princess, after the E3 2015 trailer had this excellent scene of Link walking through a dark forest with a lantern:


It just looks so atmospheric and offers a meaningful use of the Lantern, but in the final version of the game the night became so bright that you never really needed the Lantern here. And stuff like Poes would glow in the dark from a long distance. So, nothing of the Breath of the Wild nights is really new.

It also takes me back to a Zelda game concept that I used to have back in the day. It was somewhat similar to Majora's Mask with a large city in the center of the game world, but instead of 3 day cycle the game would focus on a more interesting day and night cycle, where at night scary monsters would come out and terrorize the world. Early on you would even travel only during daylight, because the terrors of the night were too dangerous.

Of course that's something that Minecraft sort of offered many years later, but it's still an interesting idea for Zelda, which could even be combined with the Guardian concept of Breath of the Wild, where you may have similar creatures that only roam during the night and become inactive during the day...

1 comment:

Eduardo Jencarelli said...

In other words, Castlevania II: Simon's Quest.