Echoes of Wisdom was a Zelda Dungeon Maker in early development

It’s The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom week, and we’ve got a new installment of Nintendo’s Ask the Developers series. This time, we have Eiji Aonuma, the producer of The Legend of Zelda series, Tomomi Sano, the director of the game from Nintendo, and Satoshi Terada from Grezzo, who is also a director on the game. Two interesting things have been confirmed: Grezzo is officially co-developing the game alongside Nintendo, and this is the first Zelda title with a female director.

Additionally, aside from Tri Force Heroes (which the interview fails to mention), this is the first original Zelda game from Grezzo, a studio previously known for working on remakes of the series.

So, what about the game itself? In these first two parts of the interview, we learned that, at one stage in the game’s development, the team considered incorporating a dungeon editor. Players could place objects around a dungeon and then share it with others to try out. However, as they experimented further, this feature evolved into a system where players could place items and objects into the game world and use them to fight enemies. This idea lasted a year before they “up ended the tea table” and came up with Echoes. Link’s Awakening HD, of course, had the Chamber Dungeon editor, but seems like it would have been a step further.

Terada: We were exploring a few different ways to play the game in parallel. In one approach, Link could copy and paste various objects, such as doors and candlesticks, to create original dungeons. During this exploration phase, this idea was called an “edit dungeon” because players could create their own The Legend of Zelda gameplay.

Aonuma: They showed it to me and told me to give it a try. As I played, I started thinking that while it’s fun to create your own dungeon and let other people play it, it’s also not so bad to place items that can be copied and pasted in the game field, and create gameplay where they can be used to fight enemies.

That was the beginning of gameplay using “echoes”. The gameplay was shifted from creating dungeons up until then to using copied-and-pasted items as tools to further your own adventure.

There’s more in the interview, including confirmation that the 2D Legend of Zelda games will remain a separate branch of the series, and that Grezzo’s work on Link’s Awakening helped inspire this direction. Grezzo confirmed.

The first two parts are out now, with the third part coming later in the week. Perfect to pass the time until the game’s release this Thursday.