Nintendo forced to defend Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s Season Pass

Zelda: Breath of the Wild will be the first game in the series to offer a Season Pass – a fact that has seen Nintendo come in for some criticism.

Quite why the platform holder has been forced to defend itself is a bit of a mystery, seeing as virtually all triple-A publishers now use the model.

Nonetheless, when pressed on the issue by IGN, Nintendo of America’s senior product marketing manager Bill Trinen had the following to say, as reported by Nintendo Life.

We actually had a lot of debate in terms of do we announce it, how do we announce it?” he said.

[The developers were] starting to get to the very end and wrap it up, really they said, ‘You know we’ve made this massive world of Hyrule, we’ve spent a long time building it. It would be a waste to just make one game and have that be it. We want people to be able to enjoy exploring this world,’ and so they started thinking about, ‘Well, if we were going to do DLC, what would we do, how would we do it?’”

Furthermore, there’s certainly no evidence that Nintendo has held back content to sell at an additional premium. This very much seems to be post-launch content.

The DLC is not launching the day after the game or the week after. It’s coming out several months later in the form of the first pack and then several months after that in the form of the second pack. And that’s because the content is in development,” Trinen added.

If you look to the example of something like a Mario Kart-type of a DLC approach… the goal is let’s give people the option to purchase it when they’re at the store buying the game and give them something to look forward to, and kind of let them know there’s more to come in this world.

And if you’re a Zelda fan buying Nintendo Switch at launch and really you’re buying it for Zelda, I mean how happy are you to know that hey, I’m going to be able to play more Zelda in this world again later this year.”