Getting the grass in Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity’s Hyrule Field right was apparently very time consuming, as according to art director Yuu Oohashi, it took “about half of development time.”
The information was shared in a previous issue of the Japanese Nintendo Dream magazine, which featured an interview with some of the 2020 game’s development staff.
Nintendo Everything translated the interview with development producer Masaki Furusawa, director Ryouta Matsushita, producer Yousuke Hayashi, and art director Yuu Oohashi.
According to the staff, hundreds of people across the company were pulled in to help Age of Calamity’s grass stand out and faithfully reproduce the style seen in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
You can check out the translated excerpt below:
Leave a CommentIs the scope of BotW’s Hyrule Field faithfully replicated in the game?
Matsushita: Initially the plan was to go with something a little different, but it ultimately ended up being quite a faithful reproduction. The atmosphere of BotW’s world really made its way onto the battlefield. With that said, there were also parts we inevitably had to change up as well.
It really gives the impression that even grass grows the same way.
Oohoshi: Yeah… That grass took ages!
(all laugh)
Furusawa: It was a real pain, wasn’t it?
Oohoshi: It took about half of development time to finishing touching up the grass in the game. We really struggled to recreate the atmosphere of Hyrule Field.
Furusawa: We had to reproduce the area in a way that would stun players.
Oohoshi: It’s the beginning of the game which is why it’s really something we wanted to focus on.
Furusawa: We asked the Zelda team at Nintendo how they made the grass in BotW and even though they shared everything down to the finer details of their methods, there was still uncertainty about whether we could reproduce it. The game has a lot of grass, so we also considered if there were other methods available to us.
Oohoshi: We experimented with a bunch of different options to make the grass stand out as one of the strong points of the game.
Matsushita: The whole company got dragged into the grass mess, didn’t they?
Oohoshi: How many hundreds of people was it? (laughs)
Matsushita: It’s no exaggeration to say we were in talks with development staff, CG departments, background and technical support the whole time.
Written by Daniel Dell-Cornejo
Daniel is an editor at Nintendo Wire. Always with his head in the clouds, he is never apart from his creative thoughts – a blessing for an aspiring fiction writer. As a journalist and lifelong gamer, he aims to provide readers with the very best in Nintendo coverage.
