Legend of Zelda: Tri Force Heroes devs on Lack of voice chat, cut costume idea

A portion of a USgamer interview with Eiji Aonuma and Tri Force Heroes director Hiromasa Shikata...

USg: Tri Force Heroes does not have a voice chat and text chat; how do you think you've made communication between players managable?

HS: With my experience on Four Swords, I thought that the play experience really changed depending on if any members of the party had previously played the title, and how familiar they were with the gameplay mechanics and the puzzles. So if you have four players together and one player was a vet, they would spend the majority of their time saying “Hey, Player 2, go do this,” “Player 3, pick that thing up,” and “Why are you doing that? Don’t do this.” For them, it takes out some of the fun because they are just ordering people around, and for the other players, rather than have an experience where they’re learning and experiencing this thing in wonderment and having a good time, they’re just being told what to do, and that’s not necessarily the best experience for people. That being said, if you’re playing with your buddies, that’s one thing you can sort of mitigate, the potential for the experience that I just described. But because Tri Force Heroes can be played online with strangers, [I] felt that it was a bigger issue.

To mitigate the issue of playing online with people you don’t know and ending up having a situation where you’re just giving instructions, we came up with the idea of the communication icons that you see on the touchscreen. And to be honest, a few of the things turned out better than anticipated. I thought it might be difficult to communicate with other players using nothing but these panels. That being said, if you’re the person who is giving instructions to some of the other people in your party, like “Hey, I need you to do this thing over there with that other thing,” just using the panels to communicate... that is sort of like a quiz, almost a puzzle in and of itself. Of course, the people who are trying to understand what is being communicated to them—for those folks, it’s also like a quiz, a quiz show, or a game, and I think the level of that sense of accomplishment, that sense of achievement is pretty outstanding and is actually a little bit unexpected, in that we hadn’t thought that it would turn out quite like that when we implemented the panels, or came up with the idea. But we were pretty happy with how it turned out.

USg: Were any costume ideas for Tri Force Heroes left on the cutting-room floor?

HS: I can think of one right off the top of my head. That would be one that was inspired by the folktale “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” which as you know is the story of the emperor who thinks he’s wearing something of the highest fashion, but he’s actually—when other people look at him, he’s not wearing anything. They thought that would be a great idea for an outfit, but they weren’t able to come up with an implementation that would—they weren’t sure how to wrap up that whole thing as one good feature spec, you know, “How could we actually implement that neat idea as something that’s relevant to the game?” They unfortunately weren’t able to come to a conclusion, so that never made the cut.