Miyamoto doesn’t like describing Zelda Wii U as ‘open world’

Will Zelda for Wii U be an open world game? Perhaps not in the traditional sense.

Speaking to shareholders, Nintendo’s development boss Shigeru Miyamoto has said that the term open-world” was used to describe the game at E3 as it’s something that players understand – personally, however, he doesn’t like it.

I prefer not to use the generally used term ‘open world’ when developing software,” he explained. This term means that there is a large world in which players can do numerous things daily.

In the traditional Legend of Zelda series, the player would play one dungeon at a time. For example, if there are eight dungeons, at the fourth dungeon, some players may think, ‘I’m already halfway through the game,’ while other players may think, ‘I still have half of the game to play.’

We are trying to gradually break down such mechanism and develop a game style in which you can enjoy The Legend of Zelda” freely in a vast world, whenever you find the time to do so.”

Miyamoto also alluded to fundamental problems with the triple-A model, speculating that Sony and Microsoft are under pressure.

I suspect that software makers that develop game software (for advanced game players) for the game systems from Microsoft and Sony must have actually been having a harder time than we think,” he claimed.

It takes a year for the development teams to get used to high-performance graphics using recent shader technology, and afterwards it requires two or three times the time and labour costs to develop a game.

According to one theory, since some projects even require the budgets of over 10bn, not all projects will be profitable. It is a harsh world, in which a game can hardly survive if it doesn’t make it into the top ten of the sales rankings.

However, I am not saying that Nintendo will not work on this. Our subsidiary, Monolith Software, is working on several projects, and Platinum Games has announced two titles for the Bayonetta series. It took time, but we are now able to develop software suitable for Wii U, and we would like to release new titles from now on.”