Recently, Japanese magazine Famitsu sat down with Yōsuke Hayashi and Ryota Matsushita from Koei Tecmo’s AAA Games Studio, to talk about the upcoming Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment game. During the interview, one of the topics ask the duo about the development experience on Nintendo Switch 2.
Hayashi then goes to mention on how the game was originally being developed for Nintendo Switch, until he decided to shift development and turn it into a Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive title, and that by doing so, the game provided a lot more fun.
You can view a translation of that specific portion of the interview below:
Famitsu: So AAA Studio’s debut title [on Switch 2] will be Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment. How has the development experience been on Nintendo Switch 2 thus far?
Matsushita: The previous game, Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, was made for the Nintendo Switch, so the upgrade in hardware is very noticeable. Thanks to the [Nintendo Switch 2]’s increased power, we’re now able to fully expand on the appeal expected of a sequel title. Overall, my impression is that it’s a much better experience developing fun games for the console.
Famitsu: Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity was a spinoff from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and I imagine that it was necessary to scale back the graphics to handle the large number of characters that appeared on-screen. I take that, thanks to the Switch 2’s power, you’re now able to display many more characters while keeping the character models close to what was seen in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, correct?
Matsushita: Breath of the Wild was an open-world game, while Age of Calamity was a Warriors-style musou game, where numerous enemies, including powerful foes, were the targets for players to defeat. Open world and musou are two genres that are fundamentally different, and this also changed how we allocated the hardware’s resources.
In that sense, even with the improvements on Nintendo Switch 2, we’re not simply trying to bring Tears of the Kingdom over as-is. Instead, we’re using the console’s improved hardware in order to create a unique appeal for this new game. That is, making sure there are lots of enemies on-screen, but also focusing on delivering a tense and exciting combat system.
Hayashi: As a matter of fact, when development of Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment had begun, we were initially developing it as a Switch 1 title. Halfway through the process however, we shifted it over to Nintendo Switch 2. But just by transferring what we had already finished to the new upgraded hardware, the amount of enemies that could be shown on screen and the frame rate saw a great increase, and the overall fun factor the game offered had increased dramatically. Even we were surprised at how much the improved hardware had improved the experience.
Matsushita: That moment really gave us the conviction that this was going to turn into something great.
Famitsu: So without changing the core gameplay, just that fact alone made such a big difference?
Hayashi: When you increase elements such as the enemy count and frame rate, the total amount of information on the screen also increases. Back when we were developing for Nintendo Switch, we were really pushing the limits of what the hardware could achieve. But with more breathing room on Nintendo Switch 2, the game now runs smoothly, and we’ve also been able to pack in even more gameplay ideas that we initially had in mind.
