Nintendo has released a new volume of their "Ask the Developer" series, this time for the remake of Ocarina of Time. It has four chapters in total, which got released yesterday and today. And it features the two producers and four members of the Nintendo Entertainment Planning & Development Group No. 3, EPD3 in short.
That's the main Zelda team, which was also responsible for Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom during the last years, where it certainly must have been refreshing to work on something simpler. And this is pretty much the most important fact coming from this interview series – the remake was developed inhouse, unlike most of the Zelda remakes and remasters in the past. Only The Wind Waker HD got made by Nintendo alone, but that was practically a one-man-job.
Like other remakes of Nintendo games, however, this served as a training grounds for the newer developers, who are mainly familiar with the recent open world titles. This is what Aonuma had to say:
By learning the game structure and development style behind the original The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and by actually rebuilding it as a full remake, it may trigger new insights that they can carry forward into future development.
And this is a good call. The open world direction is here to stay, because it has simply been too successful for the series to return to its classic formulas, but many fans are hoping for more of a compromise between the different formats, especially when it comes to dungeons. Echoes of Wisdom already showed how this could look like, but that game got developed by GREZZO, yet another Zelda team that got trained by various remakes over the years.
But this isn't just about new developers learning what made such a classic game so beloved, because it goes both ways. The two old-fashioned producers also stepped back to let the younger developers bring in their own perspective and ideas into the remake. And this led to one of the bigger changes, the manual jumping.
Now, this also raises the question how this will actually affect the development of the next 3D Zelda game. Ideally, these projects were running in parallel, or else it might take until 2030 before we see a new game. And while there haven't been any news about this, it's still possible that Monolith Soft has been helping out here, e.g. with developing graphical assets. We will probably find out tomorrow when the reviews embargo gets lifted.
We also learn that they have recreated everything from scratch. It's not like Ocarina of Time 3D or the recent Star Fox remake where they had used the original game's source code as basis. This already seemed clear with how different everything feels and looks, but it's good to have the direct confirmation from the developers.
They have also confirmed a popular theory from IGN by Logan Plant, who had the impression that this remake is supposed to be viewed from the perspective of a theater. The art director, Aya Shida, had the following to say:
We wanted to rebuild Hyrule as a rich, dense world that felt as though it could truly exist, while retaining the feel of the original. At the same time, we wanted its colorful and quirky characters to feel like a natural part of that world. Figuring out how to strike the right balance became one of the main themes of the art development. To help the team understand what we were aiming for, early in development we used phrases like “a puppet-show feel” and “the analogue feel of practical effects films” as keywords. Neither puppet shows nor practical effects films reproduce reality exactly as it is. Even so, both create a convincing sense that the characters truly exist within their respective fantasy worlds.
Something that I will always love about the Zelda series is how diverse it is in different art styles, much like with its gameplay ideas. And it's great that Nintendo is even trying something new with remakes, instead of just playing it safe, which was also the case for Link's Awakening and its cute toy diorama style. It is certainly not to everyone's taste, but I appreciate that they try to create something unique.
And like with Echoes of Wisdom, this may even lead to a new Zelda game in the same style. But it would be also pretty much perfect for a hypothetical Majora's Mask remake, because stage play and performances are an actual part of the game's story, setting, and theme.
We also learn that there will be over 150 pieces of fully orchestrated background music, though not all of them go with a full orchestra, and some of them make use the old Nintendo 64 tunes, kind of like how the Link's Awakening remake did it. As a reference, the original soundtrack has 82 titles in total, so they have almost doubled it. These are mainly for new cutscenes, but probably also for different variants of the existing themes.
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