Miyamoto explains why Zelda won’t be out in 2010

Nintendo legend, Shigeru Miyamoto, has revealed that while he would have loved to get The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword out this year, a decision was made to allow the development team more time and aim to get the game ready as soon as possible in 2011.

In fact, Miyamoto revealed that had he and his team opted for the same visual style as that used in Twilight Princess the game would already be finished.

However, from the earliest stage in development this was never likely to be the case.

“Often-times when you’re working on a game you first start off with an idea of what you want the game to look like and you spend a lot of time working on sketches or the concept art and trying to create that concept art in the game,” explained Miyamoto during an E3 roundtable session. “Often-times there can be a big lag between when the graphics get done and when the game is finally put together and complete.

“So last year, actually at this same event, an E3 round table, we showed a single piece of art in relation to this Zelda game. At that time the gameplay structure of the game was very far along and was almost complete, but the only thing we had in terms of graphics to show you was the single piece of art.

“So I think particularly now with what we’re showing, the gameplay is very complete. And then of course you’re starting to see what the visual style is going to look like. In terms of where we’re going now with development, we have a few more dungeons to create. We’re looking at creating some more challenging bosses. But for the most part we’re in the final stretch at this point. So I do feel that because the gameplay structure is so solid at this point that we are on a good pace and are going to be able to put it together relatively quickly. But because this particular style of development is something a little bit different from what we’ve done in the past, we’re not entirely confident that we would be able to get the game done before the end of the year. I could have come out and said, we are going to try to hit this year. Instead we decided it would be better to just say, we are going to take up through the end of the year for development and we’ll try to have the game ready as soon as we can next year.”

Miyamoto explained that the game’s exaggerated art style is something which is needed in order to make the gameplay work.

“Because of the implementation of Wii MotionPlus sword controls, you have to pay close attention to the enemies, how they defend, what their weaknesses are. They’re blocking with their swords or in the case of this scorpion enemy you can see, the pincers are opening at different angles. You have to be able to identify what those angles are or what those weaknesses are. That’s something that’s best illustrated to the player through the use of exaggerated-looking enemies. Trying to do that with a realistic art style simply doesn’t work well.”

At which point, producer Eiji Aonuma added: “Of course, if I hadn’t been told we had to revise the art style we would have been done a heck of a lot sooner [laughs].”

To which Miyamoto replied: “Yeah, if we had just used the same graphics from Twilight Princess the game would already be done.”

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword will be released exclusively for Wii in 2011. Check out the full roundtable report here.