Before its retail launch in two days, Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild received the spotlight treatment in a Wednesday panel at the annual Game Developers Conference. While explaining the high-level concepts driving new ideas in the highly anticipated sequel, Nintendo developers also revealed a unique prototyping system: a fully playable 8-bit Zelda game.
Three key developers on the game (Hidemaro Fujibayashi, Satoru Takizawa, Takuhiro Dohta) kicked off the presentation by showing an apparent alternate version of the original Legend of Zelda game and asked the crowd to "study" the image, which they said would explain the various elements of its session, dubbed "Change and Constant: Breaking Conventions with Breath of the Wild." It included slight sprite tweaks to the original game, with a thinner, lighter-looking tree, a log on a river's shore, and a clear bottle-shaped icon.
The developers explained that the eventual game was built with a modified Havok physics engine that made room for "clever lies" in terms of how physics and chemistry were represented. Before building that fully 3D system, however, a basic 2D engine was used to spell out the kinds of freer experiences players can expect in Breath of the Wild. The result is the prototype, pictured above, which still allows players to push objects (for the physics-based puzzles) and combine and destroy other objects (for the chemistry-based puzzles).
