Nintendo ‘never considered’ not releasing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild for the Wii U, despite the Switch being announced during the game’s development.
That’s according to series producer Eiji Aonuma, who earlier gave an extensive and in-depth interview with Eurogamer.
On the subject of the possibility of cancelling the Wii U version of the game, the executive said: “No, we never considered not releasing the Wii U version, and changing development solely to Nintendo Switch – that was never on the cards. As I mentioned, this title started development as a Wii U title, so first and foremost we started it on Wii U. After we also decided to develop for Nintendo Switch… if we’d gone more in that direction, using Nintendo Switch console’s other features that Wii U doesn’t have, we felt that a gap might have opened up in terms of the experience between both platforms.
“With Nintendo Switch we’re really happy with that functionality of being able to take it wherever you go, but beyond that we really wanted the gameplay experience to be the same, and for Wii U fans to be able to experience the same game people who play it on Switch will be able to experience.”
While the technical differences between the Switch and Wii U version of the open world RPG have already been widely reported, Aonuma was asked about whether there were any core gameplay differences between the two titles. He replied: “Actually from a gameplay perspective, it is the same experience on both platforms.
“One small difference is that the loading times on Nintendo Switch are slightly faster. That really stems from the media that the game is on – on Wii U it loads from a disc, whereas on Nintendo Switch it’s on a Game Card, so it’s a result from that.”
