The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom's producer and directors have revealed that during the early stages of the game's prototyping, the development team intended to allow players to create and share their own dungeons.
In a new Ask the Developer interview on Nintendo's website, legendary producer Eiji Aonuma, along with game directors Tomomi Sano and Satoshi Terada, answers questions about Echoes of Wisdom's design philosophy and development process.
In that interview, Aonuma says that he asked employees of Echoes of Wisdom developer Grezzo to pitch concepts for a new Zelda game, and that after receiving many pitches, the team settled on something "with a focus on copy-and-paste gameplay", as well as a mixed top-down and side-on view.
Terada says that Grezzo was "exploring a few different ways" Echoes of Wisdom could go gameplay-wise, and that one such idea allowed Link to "create original dungeons" by copying and pasting objects.
Aonuma follows up by saying that while it's "fun to create your own dungeon", he thought the gameplay idea could be shifted from creating dungeons to "using copied-and-pasted items as tools to further your own adventure".
At that point, Aonuma decided to "upend...