More interesting comments are once again coming in regarding Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, one of Nintendo Switch’s most notable games. They come again from Dengeki Online’s recent meeting with the game’s producers, Yosuke Hayashi and Masaki Furusawa, and director Ryota Matsushita.
In this meeting, they commented on how complex it was to recreate the game’s world within this musou, adding that including the full Breath of the Wild map was key to the process. Here’s what they had to say:
Regarding the map design, there were some difficulties in replicating the terrain of Breath of the Wild and, conversely, creating intact buildings and terrain that were not seen in Breath of the Wild.
Matsushita: Breath of the Wild is a game where you adventure with only one Link, and you can say that the field and the map itself are the goals of the adventure. So in this work, everything has to be reconstructed as if it were a combat scenario. Therefore, it was necessary to design two things at the same time, “reconstructing the look of 100 years ago” and “arranging it as a battlefield”.
The key words at the time of design were “100 years ago” and “battlefield”. Imagine the ruins of Breath of the Wild 100 years ago, and since it is a battlefield, the enemy’s fort was here 100 years ago and was designed by merging clues and keywords.
Furusawa: Among the development elements, the meadow near the castle was the first place we started from, and I had a hard time not only giving the impression of appearance, but also the feeling of being spacious. If you remove the image of that meadow in Breath of the Wild, it’s a different game. It was difficult to merge the meadow and the battlefield, and I was worried about how to express it as a place to fight.
On the other hand, places like Akkala Bastion, which were originally battlefields, were difficult to develop. In Breath of the Wild, if there was a turret mark, it would have been a turret before and it would have been a battle shelter, so we were able to relate it to the story.
Hayashi: It’s a simple element of game development, but during development we said, “The map screen is very important”. I talked about the fact that the map screen was the key point in capturing the feel of Breath of the Wild, and I did that consciously.