In an interview with IGN, Nintendo’s Bill Trinen provided new insights regarding Nintendo’s announcement last week that DLC will be coming to Breath of the Wild in the form of a $20 “Expansion Pass,” which received a mixed reception from fans, at best.
It’s hard to imagine that Nintendo was oblivious to the somewhat critical response it received regarding the news, and it seems the people at the company have finally taken a moment to respond (and defend) the decision.
In the video interview, Trinen, Nintendo of America’s senior product marketing manager, said:
“It was tough, because we actually had a lot of debate in terms of, ‘Do we announce it? How do we announce it?’ I think one of the things that’s unique about the way Nintendo develops games is when we’re working on a game, and certainly just knowing the history of Nintendo games, you guys know that it’s essentially we use every last minute to make the game as good as we possibly can, and really what that means is that the dev team was working on the main game, finished the main game, and as they’re starting to get to the very end and wrap it up, really they said, ‘You know we’ve made this massive world of Hyrule, we’ve spent a long time building it. It would be a waste to just make one game and have that be it.'”
Many of the criticisms about the announcement of DLC came from the assumption that Nintendo was releasing the DLC the same day as launch, leading people to wonder why it wasn’t just including in the base game, if it was already prepared.
However, Trinen assures gamers that this isn’t the case — only the Expansion Pass is available on launch day, which isn’t an uncommon practice when it comes to DLC.
“We want people to be able to enjoy exploring this world, and so they started thinking about, ‘Well, if we were going to do DLC, what would we do, how would we do it?’ And you can see that in the fact that it’s not — the DLC is not launching the day after the game or the week after. It’s coming out several months later in the form of the first pack and then several months after that in the form of the second pack. And that’s because the content is in development.”
It’s nice to know that Nintendo is trying to shed a little light on the Breath of the Wild DLC situation, and hopefully with Trinen responding to all the criticism, fans can return to being excited about the game.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild launches for Wii U and Nintendo Switch on March 3rd, alongside the new console and the Expansion Pass.
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Written by George Comatas
As a wannabe social media personality and professional in the world of sarcasm, George does his best to always adapt to the changing world around him. He considers himself a maverick: a true-to-heart gamer with the mind of a pop star. Whether this makes him revolutionary or a setback, he's yet to find out. But one thing’s for sure; he's one-of-a-kind.
