E3 2012: Shigeru Miyamoto Talks Zelda Wii U

By Matt Mann / June 8, 2012

Last E3 people were wowed by the tech demo for Zelda on the Wii U, this year Nintendo had nothing to show regarding the Zelda franchise. However, Shigeru Miyamoto was willing to talk about the franchise, and according to Miyamoto the game is unfortunately still in the research and development phase. Here is what Miyamoto had to say about Zelda on the Wii U:

"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," explained the creator of the series. "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. 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.

Miyamoto then went on to talk about "simply having the HD visuals in a Zelda game can really make the game look wonderful and give it sort of a high-quality feel". But things got a little disconcerting if you are like me and love the Zelda franchise; Miyamoto started talking about making the Zelda franchise more accessible to casual gamers. Here is what he had to say about Zelda and casual fans:

"One thing that€™s interesting is we€™re seeing how the way that tastes are broadening in video games, and you have some people who prefer more casual experiences, and you have some people who prefer sort of those 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 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."

The one franchise of Nintendo's I thought might suffer the most with the transition to HD is Zelda. The reason being that creating an HD game takes an army of talented game designers, and I don't know if Nintendo has enough people to develop a high definition Zelda game. It took Nintendo five years to create Zelda: Skyward Sword a standard definition game, how long do you think it will take them to create a HD version of Zelda? So what I feared may be happening, instead of moving the franchise toward HD, Nintendo may try to casualize the franchise to prevent the amount of work that goes into creating a HD game. To me I always thought Zelda was very accessible to the general audience, if Nintendo tries to make Zelda a more casual game it could end up alienating a huge chunk of their audience.