Hyrule Warriors Age Of Calamity was a game that many didn’t know they needed…until they got it. An evolution on the original Hyrule Warriors title, Age of Calamity took place in the world of Breath of the Wild, and told a unique prequel/alternate take on what happened in the Calamity that setup BOTW. Its story was deep, and the characters you got to play as were all kinds of fun. Not to mention, the game was beautiful and used the visual style of BOTW very well.
In an issue of Nintendo Dream, the team behind Hyrule Warriors Age Of Calamity, producer Masaki Furusawa, director Ryouta Matsushita, producer Yousuke Hayashi, and art director Yuu Oohashi, talked about what it took to make the game, including the look of the areas and the scope of the world we visited.
And apparently, one of the things that gave them the most trouble…was grass. Especially when it came to making Hyrule Field:
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.
Oohoshi: Yeah… That grass took ages! 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.
The reason for that detailed grass was because they knew it was the start of the game, so they had to make it look good then else players wouldn’t want to try out the rest. So, they asked for some help:
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.
When it came down to it, they brought in a TON of people from their company at Bandai Namco to make the grass.
Was it worth it? We thought so, as our Hyrule Warriors Age Of Calamity review showed!
