Tears of the Kingdom developers are not inspired by Elden Ring
Incidentally, the developers of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom did not take inspiration from Elden Ring or other great titles. So say Hidemaro Fujibayashi, the game’s director, and Eiji Aonuma, the series’ producer.
FromSoftware previously said that the studio was influenced by various titles when developing Elden Ring, including The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. However, it sounds like the team at Nintendo has been too busy to play this game – at least that’s true for the developers at the top.
Aside from not getting a chance to play Elden Ring during the development of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Aonuma spoke to the Dutch site RTL news roughly originally. He said: “There are situations where you make something similar to an existing game, but I would never try to incorporate other people’s ideas into my game.”
Our full translation is as follows:
The hit game Elden Ring is said to be inspired by Breath of the Wild. Was this game also a source of inspiration for you last year?
Fujibayashi: I’m sorry but we didn’t really get the chance to play the game. We’ve been too busy developing Tears of the Kingdom, resulting in not actually being able to play games. However, we have heard about it.
Even if we had the time to play games, we wouldn’t reuse ideas from them. When we make a game, we develop a general concept to create new ideas based on that.
That’s pretty interesting, because with many games from other studios, designers often talk about their inspiration from other titles. Is Zelda more likely to be made in a bubble?
Aonuma: Of course there are situations where you make something similar to an existing game, but I would never try to incorporate other people’s ideas into my game. I’m too proud for that. I’m always looking for original ideas.
When I was doing A Link Between Worlds, when you jump, you had a 3D system that made it seem like Link was coming right at you. When I showed this to former Nintendo President (Satoru) Iwata, he said he “didn’t know it was possible”. I was very happy to hear that, because for me this is the essence of game development: finding things that no one has thought of before.
Aonuma and Fujibayashi were also asked about the possibility of a return to the traditional Zelda formula. You can find their comments Here.
Translation provided by TheBrasem on behalf of Nintendo Everything.
