Age of Calamity Developers Struggled to Recreate Breath of the Wild’s Grass

The finer points of game development can be difficult and thankless. When enjoying a finished project, it’s easy to forget that most video games require enormous amounts of technical work from large teams of people, and that every step in the right direction can create new problems elsewhere. Sometimes even the smallest details can take mountains of time and effort to be correctly realized, even for experienced teams with robust budgets. It seems the Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity team at Koei Tecmo understands these difficulties well. Nintendo Everything has translated a portion of a recent interview from Japanese magazine Nintendo Dream, where the developers behind Age of Calamity discussed the arduous struggle of accurately reconstructing the grass from Breath of the Wild.

Nintendo Dream interviewed development producer Masaki Furusawa, director Ryouta Matsushita, producer Yousuke Hayashi, and art director Yuu Oohashi. According to Matsushita, the initial plan was to present Hyrule Field a bit differently in Age of Calamity, but it was ultimately decided that a faithful reproduction of the atmosphere from Breath of the Wild would better serve the game. The interviewer makes reference to the similarity of the grass, and it becomes obvious that this was a significant sticking point for the team. They go on to explain that even with input from Nintendo and a multitude of internal support departments, properly rendering the game’s grass was intensely challenging.

Here’s an excerpt from that exchange, translated by Nintendo Everything:

Is 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.

 

This is just one example of the tremendous effort that developers invest in creating and providing the video games that we enjoy so much. Even the most seemingly inconsequential minutiae of development can lead to head-banging frustration, and unexpected roadblocks are always popping up. The fact that complex games like Age of Calamity or Breath of the Wild work as well as they do while presenting vibrant, engaging worlds borders on miraculous.

What do you think? How does the grass in Age of Calamity stack up to Breath of the Wild? Let us know in the comments below!

 

Source: Nintendo Dream (via Nintendo Everything, Nintendo Life)

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