When you think about Hyrule Warriors and the challenges its development team may face, you’ll likely find yourself thinking about hundreds of enemies on screen or following the faithful Zelda lore present throughout. What we’re sure you won’t think about, is… grass?
Well, as it happens, the game’s grass turns out to be one of the more complicated puzzles facing the group behind. Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity. In an interview published in a Japanese magazine Nintendo Dream, development producer Masaki Furusawa, director Ryouta Matsushita, producer Yousuke Hayashi, and art director Yuu Oohashi talked about the trouble it caused when trying to recreate it. Zelda: Breath of the WildHyrule’s School.
Thanks to Nintendo Everything for translations below.
Matsushita: Initially, the plan was to go with something a little different, but it turned out to be a pretty honest recreation in the end. The atmosphere of the BotW world really spilled into the battlefield. With that said, there are also parts we definitely have to change.
It really gives the impression that even grass grows the same way.
Oohoshi: Yeah… That grass was ages!
(laugh)
Furusawa: It’s a real pain, isn’t it?
Oohoshi: It takes about half the development time to finish touching the grass in the game. We really worked hard to recreate the atmosphere of Hyrule Field.
Nintendo’s very own Zelda team was asked for advice, but things were still difficult even with their help:
Furusawa: We asked the Zelda team at Nintendo how they generate grass in the BotW, and although they’ve shared everything up to the finer details of their method, it’s still uncertain as to whether we’ll be able to reproduce it. or not. The game has a lot of grass, so we also considered if there were other methods available to us.
Oohoshi: We experimented with a bunch of different options to make the grass stand out as one of the game’s strong points.
Matsushita: The whole company got dragged into the haystack, right?
Oohoshi: How many hundreds of people? (laugh)
Matsushita: It is no exaggeration to say that we have discussed with the development staff, corporate governance, technical support and background knowledge throughout.
Blimey.
We don’t know about you, but we’ll never take video games for granted again.
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