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Wii U Zelda still in experimental phase
by Steve Watts, Jun 08, 2012 8:00am PDTLast year's Wii U Zelda teaser wasn't really a game, per se. We discovered later that it was just a static scene to show off the technical prowess of the new system. We also didn't see hide nor hair of a new Zelda this year, so what's the deal? Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto says the development team is still trying new things to determine the direction of the next title.
"With the last game, Skyward Sword, that was a game where you had motion control to use your weapons and a lot of different items, and I thought that was a lot of fun, but there were some people who weren't able to do that or didn't like it as much and stopped playing partway through it," Miyamoto told Entertainment Weekly. "So we're in the phase where we're looking back at what's worked very well and what has been missing and how can we evolve it further."
He also pointed out that the industry has somewhat of a divide between players who want casual experiences versus more in-depth experiences. "Obviously as a company that's been making games for a very long time, we tend to be more on the deeper, longer game side of things.
"But really what we continue to ask ourselves as we have over the years is, 'What is the most important element of Zelda if we were to try to make a Zelda game that a lot of people can play?' So we have a number of different experiments going on, and [when] we decide that we’ve found the right one of those to really help bring Zelda to a very big audience, then we’ll be happy to announce it."
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A new Zelda title is in development for the Wii U, but right now the team is still in the early phases of choosing a direction for the new game by examining what worked well in its most recent title, Skyward Sword.
A new Zelda title is in development for the Wii U, but right now the team is still in the early phases of choosing a direction for the new game by examining what worked well in its most recent title, Skyward Sword. : Shacknews
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They got a great Mario game out as a launch title and then nothing.
They got 2 solid Zelda games out (Ocarina and Majora's Mask) with a reasonable cadence next to Mario (1998, 2000).
So they did well with Zelda, Mario was underserved, but after this is kind of where the downward trend starts.
GC - Sept 2001
Super Mario Sunshine (which is nowhere near Mario 64 caliber or what Galaxy ended up being) a year after launch. Windwaker doesn't hit outside Japan until 2003. Why are you launching a Nintendo console without Mario or Zelda anywhere near the launch window?
An awful showing for their tentpole franchises in a 5 year console lifecycle.
Wii - Dec 2006
Twilight Princess is a pseudo launch title but that's obviously a bit misleading since it was just a GC game that got delayed so long they turned it into a next gen game since their next gen system happened to be only a small amount more powerful. This is an admission of the importance of having these big guys at launch but a failure to execute well and delivering a real Wii exclusive one (which Skyward Sword was, but took 5 more years to release).
Mario Galaxy in 2007 is only the 2nd 3D Mario game they've made in the 10 years since Mario 64 was such an enormous hit. That's crazy missed opportunity. Then Galaxy 2 and NSMB Wii come out a couple years later. Galaxy 2 is a pretty good example of 'more of the same' that people want and that they should've been doing for the past 2 console cycles but which Nintendo seems reluctant to do often despite gleefully throwing these characters into a million other games.
Wii U - Q4 2012
No word on 3D Mario again, looks like more 2D for the near future.
Zelda nowhere near close.
Compare that to the tentpole releases Sony and MS have for the past 2 generations. You were getting a Halo or Gears every year. You were getting a God of War or Uncharted every year once those were established. If you want to spend 5 years on each iteration of your core franchises then they better be extremely innovative and successful. Galaxy was that, but otherwise they've been using pretty tried and true formulas since the N64 hits but taking forever to get them out. NSMB was hardly an enormous innovation but it sold shitloads, so why have there been so few 2D Marios on their home console machines too?
Ultimately it doesn't seem to matter much since the people who are diehard fans will buy a Nintendo system just for the Nintendo games even if that's only 1 release in the entire generation. It's still a lot of missed opportunity for Nintendo though.
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