Miyamoto On How Nintendo Are Designing The Legend of Zelda’s World On Wii U

In an interview with iJustine (thanks, Gamespot), Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto shared a few tidbits on how the world for The Legend of Zelda on Wii U is being designed.

“With Zelda games, what we’ve always done is, we’ve always tried to make them a game where you enter this big world of Hyrule, and there’s a lot to explore and discover; but because of the hardware limitations, what we always had to do was segment off each area and piece those segments together in a way that made them feel like a big world,” Miyamoto said, while discussing the size of the world in the new game.

He continued, “But now with the hardware capabilities of Wii U, what we did was, we first started by saying, ‘well, let’s see what we can do if we take an entire world the size of the world from Twilight Princess and just try to make that as one area on the game.’”

It should be noted that the Zelda game for Wii U is still in development, so the final game may not necessarily feature a single area the size of the entire Twilight Princess map. A lot could change over the next few months. That said, it is safe to assume that the game will feature a large world, especially in light of Miyamoto’s next quote.

“There may even be times where you forget what your goal is because you’re doing other things on the side,” Miyamoto said. “There may be times when you go into one big long dungeon, or there may be times when you’re headed to a dungeon and you’re doing other things along the side.”

“But what we’re trying to do is design it in a way that you don’t necessarily have to sit down and play it for a super long time, but kind of more matched to today’s lifestyle, where you can think for a little bit and say, ‘oh, I just want to play for a little bit today and do this one thing,’ and get that done and take a break.”