Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is one of, if not the, best game to release in 2017. Even its latest DLC pack The Champions’ Ballad has been met with praise for its additional challenges and content. So what’s next for director Hidemaro Fujibayashi? Currently there are a number of ideas, which continuously came thanks to refining the game and DLC, but how that materializes in the future remains to be seen.
In conversation with IGN, Fujibayashi says he’s not sure what will come next exactly. “I can’t say at this point if it will be in sequels or in continuations, or what form it will take, but I definitely have lots of ideas and lots of motivation right now.
“I think while we were working on both the main game and the DLC, it was a process of constantly getting lots of different, new ideas as we refined the game, and finding new things we wanted to do. Even in situations like this, talking to people and finding out that people want to pet dogs gives me a lot of motivation, a lot of ideas for things we could put into the game.”
Series’ creator Eiji Aonuma also chimed in on development for the DLC, saying it was a good process for introducing the development team to new ideas without having to create another game.
“What we learned from the DLC this time around is that it’s almost like raising the world or enhancing the world. In the past, we always had to start from zero again, to completion. Usually we’d be thinking, ‘oh, I wish we could add this, we could do that.’ What we couldn’t do in that game, we would start fresh in a new game. But because we did a DLC, we realized it’s a great way to kind of just improve that world, and kind of enhance it, and kind of raise it like your own child.”
What direction the Zelda franchise could go in after this, especially with how well received Breath of the Wild’s open world has been, remains to be seen. Still, the fact that the development team is still motivated and full of new ideas is exciting indeed.