Nintendo has revealed that The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom was originally intended to let you create your own dungeons until series producer Eiji Aonuma decided on a change of direction a year into development.
Nintendo asked Grezzo, the same studio that previously developed the remake of Link's Awakening, to have its developers pitch their ideas for a new Legend of Zelda game, as Aonuma explains in the latest Ask the Developer interview. “More specifically,” Aonuma says, “we asked Grezzo, 'If you were to make the next game, what kind of game would you like it to be?' We had the chance to hear ideas from the members of Grezzo, who freely came up with and proposed them.”
The idea that ultimately took off in the early stages was to allow players to create their own dungeons. In this version, “Link could copy and paste various objects, such as doors and chandeliers, to create original dungeons,” explains Satoshi Terada, game director at Grezzo. “During this exploration phase, this idea was called 'editing dungeons' because players could create their own gameplay of The Legend of Zelda.”
A fairly similar concept was first introduced in the remake of Link's Awakening, which had its own rudimentary dungeon-creation tools. Fans have been asking for something like a “Zelda Maker” for years, but it doesn't seem like this concept would have been much like the creation-and-sharing-focused Super Mario Maker.
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Instead, it seems like customisable dungeons would have been part of a more traditional Zelda adventure. “The concept of 'editing dungeons' involved copying various things during the adventure onto the playing field and then bringing them back to create a dungeon in a specific location,” explains Tomomi Sano, the game's director at Nintendo.
“They showed it to me and told me to try it out,” Aonuma says. “As I played, I started to think that while it’s fun to create your own dungeon and let other people play, it’s also not so bad to place items that can be copied and pasted onto the playing field and create gameplay where they can be used to fight enemies.” That’s how echoes — items and creatures you can summon at will — became the focus of the final game.
But it took Aonuma around a year to suggest that the dungeon creation concept be abandoned. “Everyone else was developing the game with dungeon creation in mind, but I was right next to them thinking of something different. (laughs) But there’s a reason it took a year to turn the tea table upside down,” evoking Shigeru Miyamoto’s now infamous habit of demanding major changes to a game mid-development.
“After all, you can’t see the potential for ideas to become solid gameplay until you can verify the features and feel of them, so I wanted them to try to create it first,” Aonuma explains. “I felt that the ‘dungeon editing’ feature they showed me had significant potential to become a new way to play The Legend of Zelda games if the gameplay was changed to utilize ‘echoes’ instead. So I thought it would be nice to expand in that direction and could be even more interesting that way.”
“Of course, creating dungeons was fun,” says Sano, “but being able to copy various items and use them in different places was even more fun.”
Zelda games that can “go against the grain” of game design theory seem to be the future: Eiji Aonuma feared that Echoes of Wisdom had “too much freedom”, and then added more freedom.