Nintendo reageert op Breath of The Wild season pass-kritiek

Nintendo maakte onlangs bekend dat er een season pass komt voor The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Niet iedereen liet zich positief uit over deze keuze en dat is voor Nintendo een reden om met een reactie te komen.

Fans van de serie hadden de indruk dat de season pass een manier is van achteraf content toevoege die normaal in de game zit verwerkt – zoals een hard mode – om extra geld te verdienen. Volgens Bill Trinen, de senior product marketing manager bij Nintendo, is dat niet het geval. Het ontwikkelen van de DLC zou zelfs begonnen zijn na de afronding van de game.

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’.

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.

Trinne betreurt het dat er niet meer informatie bekend is gemaakt bij de aankondiging, want volgens hem is de DLC volledig optioneel en net zoals bij Mario Kart 8 niet meer dan een manier om wat extra voor de fans beschikbaar te maken.

He said that he wished they had more information on the DLC to release when they announced it, saying that it would more than justify the price. He compared it to Mario Kart 8’s DLC pack, which is simply an optional purchase for gamers who really love the franchise.