Lelouch0612
Growing Install Base
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Hello everyone !
Over the past weeks, as the Tears of the Kingdom hype was inexorably increasing, I shared on Famiboards the first part of Install Base's latest "A Sales Story" format, focusing on Breath of the Wild. The piece was written by Ishaan, who you might know, and was welcomed very warmly on Tears of the Kingdom pre-release thread.
Since then, we started discussing with the Famiboards staff about publishing the whole story here so that everyone can enjoy it, and read it, in anticipation of Tears of the Kingdom impending release.
I hope you'll enjoy reading it as I and others did and don't hesitate to share your thoughts and comments
The year is 1998. Ocarina of Time has been released to critical acclaim and the highest sales in the Zelda series since Zelda 1 on the NES. It is considered something of a groundbreaking game for both Nintendo and the games industry. However, while Zelda is seeing a temporary resurgence in popularity from its move to three dimensions, the years ahead will see it suffer an identity crisis that lasts for well over a decade.
• Ocarina of Time’s popularity isn’t improving the state of the Nintendo 64, whose sales remain weak on the whole. Years of uneasy relations between Nintendo and third-party publishers, combined with the innovations of the PlayStation, have made it difficult for Nintendo to compete, putting them in a distant second place behind PlayStation hardware and software sales.
• Nintendo’s upper management has seen the writing on the wall. The company tasks its producers with putting out a large amount of software with short development cycles to help offset their lower unit sales on the Nintendo 64. This is the point at which Nintendo—under the guidance of Hiroshi Yamauchi and Shigeru Miyamoto—changes its approach to game development. Instead of competing directly with other hardware and software makers, Nintendo wishes to side-step the competition entirely, emphasizing innovation on smaller budgets as opposed to expansive blockbuster games. The thinking is that releasing a large number of smaller games is a safer approach to development, and that it also increases your chances of happening upon the next big hit.
• A quote from Miyamoto, just months prior to Ocarina of Time’s release: “I feel there is a bad atmosphere that you can't do something new at Nintendo these days. I never thought things like this before. So now we are changing ourselves to an organization that allows people to do new things and energize ourselves. I'm saying to my people that from now on let's go for the game that can be developed within six months and sell a million copies. If you want to finish a game within six months, you have to make it within two months because you need to polish it for another four months. If someone asks me who can make such a thing, I'd tell them that I used to do it. It isn't a great thing to take three years. [Ocarina of Time] would have been finished in a much shorter period if we had cut some parts.”
• This leads to projects like 1080° Snowboarding and PilotWings 64, which are completed within the span of a year and go on to sell upward of a million units. This philosophy is also applied to Zelda, and Eiji Aonuma is put in charge of directing the next Zelda game and completing it in a year. This leads to the development and release of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask.
• The year is 2000. The Nintendo GameCube is being prepared for release, and coming off the Nintendo 64 there is pressure on the new console and its accompanying software to turn Nintendo’s fortunes around.
• Having completed Ocarina of Time and then taking something of a detour with Majora’s Mask, the Zelda team isn’t entirely certain what direction to take with its next game. As part of Nintendo’s new approach to software development, the company’s employees are encouraged to find an innovative gameplay hook for each game they work on whilst keeping budgets under control and development timelines as short as possible. In the absence of robust third-party support, this is meant to allow Nintendo to release a large amount of software to support its platforms.
• This ultimately leads to the development of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. Unable to conceptualize new innovative gameplay ideas, the Zelda team decides to innovate visually instead. Thus, Toon Link and the super-deformed cel-shaded style of The Wind Waker are created, and active development begins on the game. Once the project has made enough progress, Nintendo shows it off at the company’s SpaceWorld event in 2001.
• Reception to The Wind Waker’s visual style is poor, as the audience for Zelda games is primarily young adults who want to see the series continue on in the style of Ocarina of Time, with more realistically-proportioned characters and a less “childish” look. This feedback is conveyed to the Zelda team, but at this point the game is already too far along.
• Following an extremely short development cycle, The Wind Waker is released in late 2002 in Japan and early 2003 in the west. The game is well-received by critics, and receives an award for "Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction" from the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences. However, sales in the west are weak owing to the game’s super-deformed character designs, which alienate the series’ young-adult audience. Meanwhile, sales in Japan are also weak owing to the Japanese video game market having begun to decline, particularly in the case of home consoles. Nintendo dubs this phenomenon in Japan “gamer drift”.
• The weak sales of The Wind Waker, combined with failed experiments like The Legends of Zelda: Four Swords and Four Swords Adventures, leaves the Zelda brand with a major hurdle to overcome—finding relevance in a world where fewer and fewer people are playing Zelda games. Unless the Zelda team can find a way to turn things around with the next game, the series is at risk of being put on ice.
• The year is 2003. The GameCube is not doing particularly well, nor is The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. Whatever form the next Zelda takes, it needs to turn the brand’s fortunes around, or it could mean the end of the franchise.
• A sequel to The Wind Waker is presently in development, and this time the game is intended to take place on land, with Link riding on horseback to help set it apart from its predecessor. However, progress on this game has been slow, as the development team is not feeling particularly inspired. Meanwhile, series director Eiji Aonuma himself feels that another Wind Waker-esque game will not address the problems the series faces.
• Instead, Aonuma, with the help of Nintendo of America and its ability to assess the western market, has determined that three things are necessary for a Zelda title to find mainstream appeal:
• Aonuma convinces Miyamoto that this is the need of the hour and the Wind Waker 2 project is rebooted into The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess—a bigger, more ambitious game targeted at the series’ much larger western audience. Excited by the new direction, the Zelda team begins development on the new title, and once enough progress has been made, a trailer for the game (edited by Aonuma and NOA) is shown at E3 2004. Audience reception is extremely positive, letting the team know they are on the right track.
• As development continues, Twilight Princess ends up becoming one of the largest projects Nintendo has ever worked on up until this point, with a great deal of effort going into its world-building, story, characters, and exploration-heavy gameplay. The game features a large Hyrule Field that allows the player to engage in combat on horseback, while Link’s animation and the animation of his horse are more detailed than ever, to allow the player to better connect with the game. Additionally, the concept of “open-air dungeons” is explored, with several of Twilight Princess’s dungeons and puzzle-heavy segments taking place in outdoor environments that are exposed. This is intended to blur the line between the game’s open fields and dungeons, giving Twilight Princess’s Hyrule a greater sense of place.
• Unfortunately, because it is the Zelda team’s first time attempting a project of this scale, the game’s scope and development quickly balloon out of control. The project subsequently has to be de-scoped to get it back on track, and a number of ideas intended for Twilight Princess are cut back.
• Meanwhile, Nintendo’s hardware business has seen a major resurgence with the Nintendo DS. The company is now fully convinced that its new approach to making games—where they do not compete directly with the rest of the industry, but sidestep the competition with innovative ideas and new control schemes—is the path forward, and these same principles are being applied to its upcoming Wii console, which uses a TV remote-like controller to simplify the interface between user and software.
• The Zelda team is asked to port Twilight Princess to the Wii, to take advantage of growing excitement for the platform and its intuitive motion controls. This complicates the game’s arduous development cycle even further. A great deal of trial-and-error is required to make the game compatible with the Wii Remote, which features a button layout that is very different from traditional controllers.
• The effort is ultimately worth it. Twilight Princess is released in late 2006 alongside the Wii console, and is purchased by 87% of Wii buyers during its first month in North America, representing the highest attach rate for any game since Super Mario 64. In 2007, it wins an award for “Outstanding Achievement in Story and Character Development” from the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences. The game’s moody visual style, tone, exploration-heavy gameplay, and intuitive motion controls lead to it becoming something of a modest “evergreen” title, and it goes on to sell nearly 9 million units in the years ahead, making it the best-selling Zelda game up until that point.
• A side-story using Twilight Princess’s world and characters is discussed internally, and eventually morphs into Link’s Crossbow Training. The game is released just one year after Twilight Princess and goes on to sell 5.7 million units by itself, outselling a number of prior Zeldas. That same year, Nintendo also releases The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass for the Nintendo DS, which goes on to sell 4.7 million units globally off the back of its intuitive touch controls.
• Between Twilight Princess, Link’s Crossbow Training, and Phantom Hourglass, the Zelda brand enjoys a stretch of considerable success, making inroads with both the core and casual gaming audiences. Twilight Princess’s version of Zelda and Link go on to serve as the Zelda brand’s ambassadors for the next several years, representing the franchise in Nintendo’s marketing until 2015.
• The year is 2007. While Twilight Princess has found success globally, sales remain weak in Japan due to the ongoing decline of the home console market. Despite finding success globally with the DS and Wii, Nintendo’s upper management feels it needs to address the declining market in Japan as well.
• A quote from Shigeru Miyamoto: “I think a lot of people who bought the Wii are not necessarily the types of people who are interested in playing that kind of game. And a lot of the people who would want to play it [due to chronic shortages of the console] can’t find a Wii! But mostly, I think it’s that there are fewer and fewer people who are interested in playing a big role-playing game like Zelda [in Japan].”
• Despite the weak sales of traditional game software, Nintendo’s management believes that the company’s audience of casual players in Japan can be convinced to partake in more “core” experiences, provided concessions are made to ease them in. The thinking at Nintendo is that the blue ocean audience might be enticed with more straightforward, linear appearances where they cannot get lost and feel a constant sense of progress. Teams across Nintendo EAD are tasked with making the company’s core IP more approachable. Super Mario Galaxy 2 is designed to feel more guided than Galaxy 1, while an entirely new upcoming Mario game, Super Mario 3D Land, aims to blur the line between the linear 2D Marios and more exploratory 3D Marios.
• The Zelda team, too, has taken measures to appeal to Japan’s casual audience. The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass is released in 2007, and relies on simplified touch inputs using the Nintendo DS stylus. The game is successful at appealing to new audiences globally, and goes on to sell over 900,000 units in Japan alone, becoming the best-selling Zelda title in that market in several years. The team is then tasked with replicating its success in the home console space with the next 3D Zelda on Wii.
Alongside this goal, the team also tasks itself with establishing a new structure for future Zelda games, seeking to distance itself from the shadow of Ocarina of Time. Thus, the Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword begins development with three broad goals:
• A smaller team spends nearly two years experimenting with the Wii MotionPlus accessory to determine how the device can be used to enhance sword combat in a Zelda game. This frees up the Wii Remote’s A button, which is subsequently mapped to a new “dash” ability. Meanwhile, producer Eiji Aonuma and director Hidemaro Fujibayashi brainstorm how to distill Zelda’s structure down to a simpler format to make the game feel more approachable.
• Drawing inspiration from Mario games, the team decides to adopt a format where the player can simply drop down into a stage without having to explore an overworld first to get there. This is intended to make the game feel more compact, more approachable, and to simplify the development process. The new structure leads to Skyward Sword forgoing an overworld, and each area being designed to feel like a combination of indoor and outdoor dungeons, taking the “open-air dungeon” concept a step further.
• In parallel, Link’s new sidekick, Fi, is designed to serve as a guide for the more casual player, often providing hints and solutions to puzzles.
• Skyward Sword is released in 2011. It reviews well like every prior Zelda, but sees weak sales and disinterest from the gaming audience at large owing to a variety of factors:
• Over the next two years, Nintendo receives feedback through multiple channels that players are not keen on Skyward Sword’s simplified structure and emphasis on lengthy dungeons without an overworld to explore. By 2012, it is clear that the same principles that could be applied to designing Nintendo’s more casual software cannot be applied to Zelda. The brand finds itself at a crossroads once more, unclear about who its core audience is, and how to keep up with its contemporaries. A reinvention is in order, or Zelda risks growing irrelevant once more in an increasingly competitive industry.
• In parallel, Nintendo is preparing to release a successor to the Wii—the upcoming Wii U console—marking the company’s first skirmishes with HD development. On HD platforms, the budgets of even smaller games are much higher than their SD counterparts, and development cycles considerably longer. As a company that emphasizes conservative budgets and efficient development cycles, Nintendo’s future in the HD era is uncertain.
• The year is 2012. Nintendo is preparing to release the Wii U, the successor to its Wii console. The goal of the Wii U is to act as a device that complements the television, even allowing the user to directly control their TV set using the Wii U GamePad. Additionally, the console is meant to address a number of its predecessor’s commonly-cited shortcomings. This includes a more traditional control scheme out of the box, which Nintendo hopes will encourage better support from third-party developers.
• By this point in time, the games industry as a whole has made significant strides in bridging the gap between the core gaming audience and the broader casual audience. Traditional video game experiences on high-definition platforms are growing more popular than ever, and Nintendo recognizes that it will need to keep up if it wants to remain competitive in the long term.
• A quote from Nintendo’s president at the time, Satoru Iwata: “That core vs. casual debate seems like something that can never see a resolution, but with Wii U, I have a feeling that it all may change. I even feel that the barrier that separated the two genres was only something psychological, just an impression that people had about them. For example, The Legend of Zelda games were something geared towards the toughest audience, and it has been so from the beginning. So it's not like at Nintendo we don't have it in us. But there are quite a number of people who assume that Nintendo is the equivalent of being casual. If we are able to break those psychological barriers with Wii U, I feel like we will be able to take our goal of expanding the gaming population even further. It would even be possible to expand our customer base and bring in more people, and out of those new people, there will be those who will find certain controls or elements of deeper gameplay intriguing, and eventually will become passionate game fans. That was the way the history of video games has been, and I want to keep the tradition going so it doesn't fade away. That, I think is the true meaning of ‘a game for everyone’. A game for everyone isn't just wide, but also very deep. That's how it will become everyone's game.”
• With the move to an HD platform and Nintendo now more willing to commit larger budgets to its flagship games, producer Eiji Aonuma and director Hidemaro Fujibayashi are able to make a case for the next Zelda project to be more ambitious and open, broadly following in the footsteps of Twilight Princess, which Aonuma later says he considered a “starting point” for this new game.
• After a period of prototyping around the concept of more player freedom, development of a new Zelda game begins with two broad goals:
• Development of this new game begins with Aonuma inviting members of the Zelda team to conceptualize a new look for Link—one that would be indicative of the kind of new adventures he might go on. Over one hundred designs are submitted, with the team eventually settling on the idea of a Link wearing a blue tunic. A realistically-proportioned Link is chosen as Nintendo feels a super-deformed style would turn players off. The realistic style is also meant to help players relate more easily to the game, and the actions that they might be able to perform within it.
• On the technical side of things, the team takes the entirety of Twilight Princess’s map and places it within the new development engine to test whether that game’s entire overworld can be made explorable as a single, seamless area with no loading screens in between.
• In addition to creating a game that is fully open world, director Hidemaro Fujibayashi’s other goal is to create a game that feels “active” (where the player actively takes on the game world) rather than “passive” (where the player simply reacts to events in the game world). This leads to giving Link the ability to climb and jump off any surface in the environment, turning the act of traversing the game world into a puzzle in itself.
• A quote from Fujibayashi: “Our first step in designing the game was to reexamine these conventions, and put our sights on changing the structure of the game from a passive one (where you play within the confines of a pre-prepared mechanism) to one where the user can actively engage with the game. So what is an active game? Our first approach was to remove those impassable walls, which were a convention of Zelda, by transforming the walls and allowing the user to climb them in our experimental game field. By transforming walls, which were used to represent boundaries, into another optional path, it's as if the entire landscape that lays before the user opens up, asking them 'So, which path are you going to take?' It was at this point I realized that this was the kind of game design I was striving for, and holds the potential to create this 'active game' I had envisioned.”
Link diving towards Himeji Castle in a prototype overworld map for Breath of the Wild. (Screenshot: CEDEC 2017)
• In order to realize this vision of a vast world, the Zelda team renders a terrain map of the city of Kyoto using map data from Google and Zenrin Co. Ltd., and temporarily places the Twilight Princess map in the upper-left corner of this world. The Kyoto map is then populated with models of historic Japanese monuments in order to help the team get a sense of scale and it serves as the foundation for the new Zelda’s Hyrule.
• Once the team is confident in its ability to deliver a seamless, open-world experience Nintendo officially announces that a new Zelda game is in development for the Wii U in January 2013, and that its goal is to break the conventions of the series and establish a new structure for Zelda.
• As the team begins to craft its new Hyrule, three keywords are used to aid in its creation: distance, density, and "time spent”. Distance refers to how long it takes the player to traverse the world. Density refers to the spread of events, enemy encounters, and other such elements across the world. Finally, “time spent” refers to how long a player might spend engaging with any individual event in the world. These keywords are meant to help provide the player with an experience that allows for a constant sense of discovery.
• These three keywords guide the creation of everything in the new Hyrule, including the space between Sheikah Towers, the shape of different landforms, and the size and placement of the Shrines, which the team designs to serve as bite-sized dungeons, not wanting to trap players in any one activity for too long. The game is laser-focused on player agency and flexibility.
• In crafting its new Hyrule, the Zelda team looks to open-world games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, with Aonuma also mentioning The Witcher 3 and Far Cry as examples of games the team is aware of. A number of developers from Monolith Soft who designed the world and user interface of Xenoblade Chronicles X are brought aboard to aid in both world design and game design for this new Zelda. The combined team ultimately builds a Hyrule that is about twelve times the size of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and takes the idea of “open-air” puzzles even further than Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword.
• The final piece of the puzzle takes the form of a hyper-interactive physics and chemistry system, prototyped using a tech demo in the style of Zelda 1 on the NES. This system assigns an “element” to every object in the game, allowing for pre-scripted, context-specific actions from prior Zelda titles to be realized in real-time. These include the ability to set fire to any wooden object, shield surf across any sloping surface, and use wind in a variety of ways to influence the world and objects within it. Along with the open environment, this system turns the new Zelda into an experience where the player feels as though they are living in its world, instead of simply fighting and solving puzzles within a traditional video game.
• In order to let players enjoy the game's world, the game's user interface is simplified to the barest necessities, displaying information only when necessary. The team also creates a new warm-white colour, dubbed "Zelda White," and this is used across icons, logos, and even the game's packaging.
"Zelda White," a warm white colour that is used across the game's icons, logos, and packaging.
(Very difficult to see if using the TotK Fami theme)
• As development progresses and the new Zelda game is delayed beyond its initial 2015 release window, Nintendo realizes that the Wii U platform will not be able to provide a large enough user base for it. The team is asked to port the game to the company’s upcoming hybrid platform, the Nintendo Switch, which is designed to consolidate Nintendo’s console and handheld expertise into a single device.
• In interviews with the press, Aonuma compares the new Zelda game to switching from Japanese food to Western food, confirming that the game is designed primarily around Western tastes.
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is released in March 2017, alongside the Nintendo Switch. At launch, the game sees a 100% attach rate with the Switch, selling over a million units in North America within the span of a month. Its groundbreaking approach to open-world design and positive word-of-mouth carry the game for the next several years, eventually leading to it selling over 30 million units globally.
• In the years that follow, a number of games draw inspiration from Breath of the Wild in one form or another, including Elden Ring, Shin Megami Tensei V, and most notably Genshin Impact. In interviews, Nintendo states that the “open-air” structure of Breath of the Wild is going to be the standard for Zelda games for the foreseeable future, and that it intends to re-use the game’s world and groundbreaking physics system for its next Zelda title as well.
— thanks for reading —
The original article can be found on Install Base here : https://www.installbaseforum.com/forums/threads/a-sales-story-e10-breath-of-the-wild.1582/
Alongside the 9 other Sales stories written so far: https://www.installbaseforum.com/forums/forums/the-market.6/?prefix_id=18
This write-up represents a fairly truncated version of the events it outlines. The history of Zelda is long and complex, and there's a lot more nuance to be found at the resources below, penned by me:
Over the past weeks, as the Tears of the Kingdom hype was inexorably increasing, I shared on Famiboards the first part of Install Base's latest "A Sales Story" format, focusing on Breath of the Wild. The piece was written by Ishaan, who you might know, and was welcomed very warmly on Tears of the Kingdom pre-release thread.
Since then, we started discussing with the Famiboards staff about publishing the whole story here so that everyone can enjoy it, and read it, in anticipation of Tears of the Kingdom impending release.
I hope you'll enjoy reading it as I and others did and don't hesitate to share your thoughts and comments
The year is 1998. Ocarina of Time has been released to critical acclaim and the highest sales in the Zelda series since Zelda 1 on the NES. It is considered something of a groundbreaking game for both Nintendo and the games industry. However, while Zelda is seeing a temporary resurgence in popularity from its move to three dimensions, the years ahead will see it suffer an identity crisis that lasts for well over a decade.
• Ocarina of Time’s popularity isn’t improving the state of the Nintendo 64, whose sales remain weak on the whole. Years of uneasy relations between Nintendo and third-party publishers, combined with the innovations of the PlayStation, have made it difficult for Nintendo to compete, putting them in a distant second place behind PlayStation hardware and software sales.
• Nintendo’s upper management has seen the writing on the wall. The company tasks its producers with putting out a large amount of software with short development cycles to help offset their lower unit sales on the Nintendo 64. This is the point at which Nintendo—under the guidance of Hiroshi Yamauchi and Shigeru Miyamoto—changes its approach to game development. Instead of competing directly with other hardware and software makers, Nintendo wishes to side-step the competition entirely, emphasizing innovation on smaller budgets as opposed to expansive blockbuster games. The thinking is that releasing a large number of smaller games is a safer approach to development, and that it also increases your chances of happening upon the next big hit.
• A quote from Miyamoto, just months prior to Ocarina of Time’s release: “I feel there is a bad atmosphere that you can't do something new at Nintendo these days. I never thought things like this before. So now we are changing ourselves to an organization that allows people to do new things and energize ourselves. I'm saying to my people that from now on let's go for the game that can be developed within six months and sell a million copies. If you want to finish a game within six months, you have to make it within two months because you need to polish it for another four months. If someone asks me who can make such a thing, I'd tell them that I used to do it. It isn't a great thing to take three years. [Ocarina of Time] would have been finished in a much shorter period if we had cut some parts.”
• This leads to projects like 1080° Snowboarding and PilotWings 64, which are completed within the span of a year and go on to sell upward of a million units. This philosophy is also applied to Zelda, and Eiji Aonuma is put in charge of directing the next Zelda game and completing it in a year. This leads to the development and release of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask.
• The year is 2000. The Nintendo GameCube is being prepared for release, and coming off the Nintendo 64 there is pressure on the new console and its accompanying software to turn Nintendo’s fortunes around.
• Having completed Ocarina of Time and then taking something of a detour with Majora’s Mask, the Zelda team isn’t entirely certain what direction to take with its next game. As part of Nintendo’s new approach to software development, the company’s employees are encouraged to find an innovative gameplay hook for each game they work on whilst keeping budgets under control and development timelines as short as possible. In the absence of robust third-party support, this is meant to allow Nintendo to release a large amount of software to support its platforms.
• This ultimately leads to the development of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. Unable to conceptualize new innovative gameplay ideas, the Zelda team decides to innovate visually instead. Thus, Toon Link and the super-deformed cel-shaded style of The Wind Waker are created, and active development begins on the game. Once the project has made enough progress, Nintendo shows it off at the company’s SpaceWorld event in 2001.
• Reception to The Wind Waker’s visual style is poor, as the audience for Zelda games is primarily young adults who want to see the series continue on in the style of Ocarina of Time, with more realistically-proportioned characters and a less “childish” look. This feedback is conveyed to the Zelda team, but at this point the game is already too far along.
• Following an extremely short development cycle, The Wind Waker is released in late 2002 in Japan and early 2003 in the west. The game is well-received by critics, and receives an award for "Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction" from the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences. However, sales in the west are weak owing to the game’s super-deformed character designs, which alienate the series’ young-adult audience. Meanwhile, sales in Japan are also weak owing to the Japanese video game market having begun to decline, particularly in the case of home consoles. Nintendo dubs this phenomenon in Japan “gamer drift”.
• The weak sales of The Wind Waker, combined with failed experiments like The Legends of Zelda: Four Swords and Four Swords Adventures, leaves the Zelda brand with a major hurdle to overcome—finding relevance in a world where fewer and fewer people are playing Zelda games. Unless the Zelda team can find a way to turn things around with the next game, the series is at risk of being put on ice.
• The year is 2003. The GameCube is not doing particularly well, nor is The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. Whatever form the next Zelda takes, it needs to turn the brand’s fortunes around, or it could mean the end of the franchise.
• A sequel to The Wind Waker is presently in development, and this time the game is intended to take place on land, with Link riding on horseback to help set it apart from its predecessor. However, progress on this game has been slow, as the development team is not feeling particularly inspired. Meanwhile, series director Eiji Aonuma himself feels that another Wind Waker-esque game will not address the problems the series faces.
• Instead, Aonuma, with the help of Nintendo of America and its ability to assess the western market, has determined that three things are necessary for a Zelda title to find mainstream appeal:
- A cool, realistically-proportioned Link that gives the game a greater sense of realism
- A vast fantasy world to explore
- The ability to explore this world on horseback, giving the player a sense of adventure
• Aonuma convinces Miyamoto that this is the need of the hour and the Wind Waker 2 project is rebooted into The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess—a bigger, more ambitious game targeted at the series’ much larger western audience. Excited by the new direction, the Zelda team begins development on the new title, and once enough progress has been made, a trailer for the game (edited by Aonuma and NOA) is shown at E3 2004. Audience reception is extremely positive, letting the team know they are on the right track.
• As development continues, Twilight Princess ends up becoming one of the largest projects Nintendo has ever worked on up until this point, with a great deal of effort going into its world-building, story, characters, and exploration-heavy gameplay. The game features a large Hyrule Field that allows the player to engage in combat on horseback, while Link’s animation and the animation of his horse are more detailed than ever, to allow the player to better connect with the game. Additionally, the concept of “open-air dungeons” is explored, with several of Twilight Princess’s dungeons and puzzle-heavy segments taking place in outdoor environments that are exposed. This is intended to blur the line between the game’s open fields and dungeons, giving Twilight Princess’s Hyrule a greater sense of place.
• Unfortunately, because it is the Zelda team’s first time attempting a project of this scale, the game’s scope and development quickly balloon out of control. The project subsequently has to be de-scoped to get it back on track, and a number of ideas intended for Twilight Princess are cut back.
• Meanwhile, Nintendo’s hardware business has seen a major resurgence with the Nintendo DS. The company is now fully convinced that its new approach to making games—where they do not compete directly with the rest of the industry, but sidestep the competition with innovative ideas and new control schemes—is the path forward, and these same principles are being applied to its upcoming Wii console, which uses a TV remote-like controller to simplify the interface between user and software.
• The Zelda team is asked to port Twilight Princess to the Wii, to take advantage of growing excitement for the platform and its intuitive motion controls. This complicates the game’s arduous development cycle even further. A great deal of trial-and-error is required to make the game compatible with the Wii Remote, which features a button layout that is very different from traditional controllers.
• The effort is ultimately worth it. Twilight Princess is released in late 2006 alongside the Wii console, and is purchased by 87% of Wii buyers during its first month in North America, representing the highest attach rate for any game since Super Mario 64. In 2007, it wins an award for “Outstanding Achievement in Story and Character Development” from the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences. The game’s moody visual style, tone, exploration-heavy gameplay, and intuitive motion controls lead to it becoming something of a modest “evergreen” title, and it goes on to sell nearly 9 million units in the years ahead, making it the best-selling Zelda game up until that point.
• A side-story using Twilight Princess’s world and characters is discussed internally, and eventually morphs into Link’s Crossbow Training. The game is released just one year after Twilight Princess and goes on to sell 5.7 million units by itself, outselling a number of prior Zeldas. That same year, Nintendo also releases The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass for the Nintendo DS, which goes on to sell 4.7 million units globally off the back of its intuitive touch controls.
• Between Twilight Princess, Link’s Crossbow Training, and Phantom Hourglass, the Zelda brand enjoys a stretch of considerable success, making inroads with both the core and casual gaming audiences. Twilight Princess’s version of Zelda and Link go on to serve as the Zelda brand’s ambassadors for the next several years, representing the franchise in Nintendo’s marketing until 2015.
• The year is 2007. While Twilight Princess has found success globally, sales remain weak in Japan due to the ongoing decline of the home console market. Despite finding success globally with the DS and Wii, Nintendo’s upper management feels it needs to address the declining market in Japan as well.
• A quote from Shigeru Miyamoto: “I think a lot of people who bought the Wii are not necessarily the types of people who are interested in playing that kind of game. And a lot of the people who would want to play it [due to chronic shortages of the console] can’t find a Wii! But mostly, I think it’s that there are fewer and fewer people who are interested in playing a big role-playing game like Zelda [in Japan].”
• Despite the weak sales of traditional game software, Nintendo’s management believes that the company’s audience of casual players in Japan can be convinced to partake in more “core” experiences, provided concessions are made to ease them in. The thinking at Nintendo is that the blue ocean audience might be enticed with more straightforward, linear appearances where they cannot get lost and feel a constant sense of progress. Teams across Nintendo EAD are tasked with making the company’s core IP more approachable. Super Mario Galaxy 2 is designed to feel more guided than Galaxy 1, while an entirely new upcoming Mario game, Super Mario 3D Land, aims to blur the line between the linear 2D Marios and more exploratory 3D Marios.
• The Zelda team, too, has taken measures to appeal to Japan’s casual audience. The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass is released in 2007, and relies on simplified touch inputs using the Nintendo DS stylus. The game is successful at appealing to new audiences globally, and goes on to sell over 900,000 units in Japan alone, becoming the best-selling Zelda title in that market in several years. The team is then tasked with replicating its success in the home console space with the next 3D Zelda on Wii.
Alongside this goal, the team also tasks itself with establishing a new structure for future Zelda games, seeking to distance itself from the shadow of Ocarina of Time. Thus, the Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword begins development with three broad goals:
- Making a 3D Zelda game more approachable and accessible
- Deepening the motion controls introduced in Twilight Princess
- Making a smaller, more “dense” game that falls more in line with Nintendo’s ongoing innovation-over-expanse approach to development and also helps establish a new structure for future Zeldas
• A smaller team spends nearly two years experimenting with the Wii MotionPlus accessory to determine how the device can be used to enhance sword combat in a Zelda game. This frees up the Wii Remote’s A button, which is subsequently mapped to a new “dash” ability. Meanwhile, producer Eiji Aonuma and director Hidemaro Fujibayashi brainstorm how to distill Zelda’s structure down to a simpler format to make the game feel more approachable.
• Drawing inspiration from Mario games, the team decides to adopt a format where the player can simply drop down into a stage without having to explore an overworld first to get there. This is intended to make the game feel more compact, more approachable, and to simplify the development process. The new structure leads to Skyward Sword forgoing an overworld, and each area being designed to feel like a combination of indoor and outdoor dungeons, taking the “open-air dungeon” concept a step further.
• In parallel, Link’s new sidekick, Fi, is designed to serve as a guide for the more casual player, often providing hints and solutions to puzzles.
• Skyward Sword is released in 2011. It reviews well like every prior Zelda, but sees weak sales and disinterest from the gaming audience at large owing to a variety of factors:
- The concessions made to appeal to Nintendo’s blue ocean audience do not entice said audience to buy the game
- The game releases into a market where expansive, exploratory experiences like The Elder Scrolls and Assassin’s Creed are the preferred format for the action-adventure genre
- A declining software market on the Wii
• Over the next two years, Nintendo receives feedback through multiple channels that players are not keen on Skyward Sword’s simplified structure and emphasis on lengthy dungeons without an overworld to explore. By 2012, it is clear that the same principles that could be applied to designing Nintendo’s more casual software cannot be applied to Zelda. The brand finds itself at a crossroads once more, unclear about who its core audience is, and how to keep up with its contemporaries. A reinvention is in order, or Zelda risks growing irrelevant once more in an increasingly competitive industry.
• In parallel, Nintendo is preparing to release a successor to the Wii—the upcoming Wii U console—marking the company’s first skirmishes with HD development. On HD platforms, the budgets of even smaller games are much higher than their SD counterparts, and development cycles considerably longer. As a company that emphasizes conservative budgets and efficient development cycles, Nintendo’s future in the HD era is uncertain.
• The year is 2012. Nintendo is preparing to release the Wii U, the successor to its Wii console. The goal of the Wii U is to act as a device that complements the television, even allowing the user to directly control their TV set using the Wii U GamePad. Additionally, the console is meant to address a number of its predecessor’s commonly-cited shortcomings. This includes a more traditional control scheme out of the box, which Nintendo hopes will encourage better support from third-party developers.
• By this point in time, the games industry as a whole has made significant strides in bridging the gap between the core gaming audience and the broader casual audience. Traditional video game experiences on high-definition platforms are growing more popular than ever, and Nintendo recognizes that it will need to keep up if it wants to remain competitive in the long term.
• A quote from Nintendo’s president at the time, Satoru Iwata: “That core vs. casual debate seems like something that can never see a resolution, but with Wii U, I have a feeling that it all may change. I even feel that the barrier that separated the two genres was only something psychological, just an impression that people had about them. For example, The Legend of Zelda games were something geared towards the toughest audience, and it has been so from the beginning. So it's not like at Nintendo we don't have it in us. But there are quite a number of people who assume that Nintendo is the equivalent of being casual. If we are able to break those psychological barriers with Wii U, I feel like we will be able to take our goal of expanding the gaming population even further. It would even be possible to expand our customer base and bring in more people, and out of those new people, there will be those who will find certain controls or elements of deeper gameplay intriguing, and eventually will become passionate game fans. That was the way the history of video games has been, and I want to keep the tradition going so it doesn't fade away. That, I think is the true meaning of ‘a game for everyone’. A game for everyone isn't just wide, but also very deep. That's how it will become everyone's game.”
• With the move to an HD platform and Nintendo now more willing to commit larger budgets to its flagship games, producer Eiji Aonuma and director Hidemaro Fujibayashi are able to make a case for the next Zelda project to be more ambitious and open, broadly following in the footsteps of Twilight Princess, which Aonuma later says he considered a “starting point” for this new game.
Viewed dead on, the design of Twilight Princess's overworld bears some very obvious similarities to the "peaks and valleys" design of Breath of the Wild. (Screenshot: Monster Maze)
• After a period of prototyping around the concept of more player freedom, development of a new Zelda game begins with two broad goals:
- To create an open-world game set in a large, seamless environment
- To rethink the conventions of the Zelda series, which by now are at odds with the tastes of the broader video game market
• Development of this new game begins with Aonuma inviting members of the Zelda team to conceptualize a new look for Link—one that would be indicative of the kind of new adventures he might go on. Over one hundred designs are submitted, with the team eventually settling on the idea of a Link wearing a blue tunic. A realistically-proportioned Link is chosen as Nintendo feels a super-deformed style would turn players off. The realistic style is also meant to help players relate more easily to the game, and the actions that they might be able to perform within it.
• On the technical side of things, the team takes the entirety of Twilight Princess’s map and places it within the new development engine to test whether that game’s entire overworld can be made explorable as a single, seamless area with no loading screens in between.
• In addition to creating a game that is fully open world, director Hidemaro Fujibayashi’s other goal is to create a game that feels “active” (where the player actively takes on the game world) rather than “passive” (where the player simply reacts to events in the game world). This leads to giving Link the ability to climb and jump off any surface in the environment, turning the act of traversing the game world into a puzzle in itself.
• A quote from Fujibayashi: “Our first step in designing the game was to reexamine these conventions, and put our sights on changing the structure of the game from a passive one (where you play within the confines of a pre-prepared mechanism) to one where the user can actively engage with the game. So what is an active game? Our first approach was to remove those impassable walls, which were a convention of Zelda, by transforming the walls and allowing the user to climb them in our experimental game field. By transforming walls, which were used to represent boundaries, into another optional path, it's as if the entire landscape that lays before the user opens up, asking them 'So, which path are you going to take?' It was at this point I realized that this was the kind of game design I was striving for, and holds the potential to create this 'active game' I had envisioned.”
Link diving towards Himeji Castle in a prototype overworld map for Breath of the Wild. (Screenshot: CEDEC 2017)
• In order to realize this vision of a vast world, the Zelda team renders a terrain map of the city of Kyoto using map data from Google and Zenrin Co. Ltd., and temporarily places the Twilight Princess map in the upper-left corner of this world. The Kyoto map is then populated with models of historic Japanese monuments in order to help the team get a sense of scale and it serves as the foundation for the new Zelda’s Hyrule.
• Once the team is confident in its ability to deliver a seamless, open-world experience Nintendo officially announces that a new Zelda game is in development for the Wii U in January 2013, and that its goal is to break the conventions of the series and establish a new structure for Zelda.
• As the team begins to craft its new Hyrule, three keywords are used to aid in its creation: distance, density, and "time spent”. Distance refers to how long it takes the player to traverse the world. Density refers to the spread of events, enemy encounters, and other such elements across the world. Finally, “time spent” refers to how long a player might spend engaging with any individual event in the world. These keywords are meant to help provide the player with an experience that allows for a constant sense of discovery.
• These three keywords guide the creation of everything in the new Hyrule, including the space between Sheikah Towers, the shape of different landforms, and the size and placement of the Shrines, which the team designs to serve as bite-sized dungeons, not wanting to trap players in any one activity for too long. The game is laser-focused on player agency and flexibility.
• In crafting its new Hyrule, the Zelda team looks to open-world games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, with Aonuma also mentioning The Witcher 3 and Far Cry as examples of games the team is aware of. A number of developers from Monolith Soft who designed the world and user interface of Xenoblade Chronicles X are brought aboard to aid in both world design and game design for this new Zelda. The combined team ultimately builds a Hyrule that is about twelve times the size of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and takes the idea of “open-air” puzzles even further than Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword.
• The final piece of the puzzle takes the form of a hyper-interactive physics and chemistry system, prototyped using a tech demo in the style of Zelda 1 on the NES. This system assigns an “element” to every object in the game, allowing for pre-scripted, context-specific actions from prior Zelda titles to be realized in real-time. These include the ability to set fire to any wooden object, shield surf across any sloping surface, and use wind in a variety of ways to influence the world and objects within it. Along with the open environment, this system turns the new Zelda into an experience where the player feels as though they are living in its world, instead of simply fighting and solving puzzles within a traditional video game.
• In order to let players enjoy the game's world, the game's user interface is simplified to the barest necessities, displaying information only when necessary. The team also creates a new warm-white colour, dubbed "Zelda White," and this is used across icons, logos, and even the game's packaging.
"Zelda White," a warm white colour that is used across the game's icons, logos, and packaging.
(Very difficult to see if using the TotK Fami theme
)
• As development progresses and the new Zelda game is delayed beyond its initial 2015 release window, Nintendo realizes that the Wii U platform will not be able to provide a large enough user base for it. The team is asked to port the game to the company’s upcoming hybrid platform, the Nintendo Switch, which is designed to consolidate Nintendo’s console and handheld expertise into a single device.
• In interviews with the press, Aonuma compares the new Zelda game to switching from Japanese food to Western food, confirming that the game is designed primarily around Western tastes.
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is released in March 2017, alongside the Nintendo Switch. At launch, the game sees a 100% attach rate with the Switch, selling over a million units in North America within the span of a month. Its groundbreaking approach to open-world design and positive word-of-mouth carry the game for the next several years, eventually leading to it selling over 30 million units globally.
• In the years that follow, a number of games draw inspiration from Breath of the Wild in one form or another, including Elden Ring, Shin Megami Tensei V, and most notably Genshin Impact. In interviews, Nintendo states that the “open-air” structure of Breath of the Wild is going to be the standard for Zelda games for the foreseeable future, and that it intends to re-use the game’s world and groundbreaking physics system for its next Zelda title as well.
— thanks for reading —
Alongside the 9 other Sales stories written so far: https://www.installbaseforum.com/forums/forums/the-market.6/?prefix_id=18
This write-up represents a fairly truncated version of the events it outlines. The history of Zelda is long and complex, and there's a lot more nuance to be found at the resources below, penned by me:
