Ever since Skyward Sword HD was on the table, it made sense that the port-happy, Australian studio Tantalus would take the job again, after their work on Twilight Princess HD for the Wii U, where this blog even kept reminding you of their existence for that very reason. And as confirmed by vooks.net, Tantalus is indeed still part of the Zelda family and had taken over the job of tomorrow's release.
Still... this comes of a slight surprise at this point, because Skyward Sword HD looks much closer to The Wind Waker HD in terms of development efforts, where only a small part of the Zelda team had been working on the remaster. Upscaled graphics, new controls, a small number of quality of life improvements, done is the new Switch release.
It's likely that they had to polish all the textures again to make them truly HD (with The Wind Waker they already had high resolution textures available), because otherwise there is nothing that really explains their involvement here. And overall it's a shame that they had an external studio working on this, but they didn't bother to add any new content...
Twilight Princess HD had the new Miiverse stamps to collect, which was really great, and the Cave of Shadows. The latter was essentially just a modified Cave of Ordeals, but it was better than nothing and they could have added a similar dungeon to this remaster for a good challenge.
In the very least there should have been more Medals to collect, but my dream for this remaster always has been late-game nighttime exploration of the surface world for some additional side quests. Of course this would have involved some larger efforts, because you would need the nighttime visuals for most of the surface world, but it also would gone perfectly hand-in-hand with the theme of re-exploring the major environments in different conditions. And if you hire an entire studio for such a remaster, you can think a little bigger...
4 comments:
Huh, I thought Wind Waker HD was a much more substantial remaster than TPHD.
Between the Tingle Tuner -> Bottles change, the Triforce quest change, the Swift Sail, the dual/touch screen real-time item swapping, the Hero's Charm changes, and the graphical upgrades, it just seemed more substantial than a reduction in the # of Tears of Light, inclusion of a Cave of Ordeals remix for wolves, and addition of Miiverse stamp chests (plus a carry-over of the graphical and control upgrades that had been figured out for WWHD).
Well, it's a fact that The Wind Waker HD was made by a small number of people in a few months, while Twilight Princess HD had an entire studio working on it with Tantalus. That's what I meant, really. It seemed like Skyward Sword HD was in a similar spot to The Wind Waker HD, where this was just a small side project at Nintendo.
While I agree that The Wind Waker HD is overall the best of the HD remasters, keep in mind that Twilight Princess HD had all its textures redone, which wasn't required for TWWHD. And TPHD was the only HD remaster so far with new environments with the Cave of Shadows, even if it's based on the Cave of Ordeals. So, overall there were more efforts put into this.
The way I look at it is that Wind Waker HD and Twilight Princess HD and even the 3ds versions of OOT and MM were all far more ambitious than Skyward Sword HD. Most notable new addition in SSHD is button controls. No new in-game content as far as I'm aware.
Nintendo's remasters have definitely been hit or miss lately. 3d World has been the gold standard recently. They sped up the characters significantly and added a side mode that plays like a combination of Odyssey and 3d World with 1 huge sandbox. 3d All Stars had no quality of life besides better in-game text. Skyward Sword HD has more effort than 3DAS at least tho it's a separate game unlike the former which was a 3 in 1 package...
Post a Comment