Zelda producer says they always start work on gameplay before creating the story

In a new interview with The Washington Post the legendary producer of The Legend of Zelda series, Eiji Aonuma, has said that that the stories behind The Legend of Zelda games are always created after they have established the gameplay and its concepts. Once the gameplay and the concepts have been fully realised the team then starts to work on creating an engrossing story. The Washington Post says that this stands on contrast with other large developers who work on the narrative first and then the overall gameplay.

Another contrast to the rest of the industry: Nintendo games are typically written with story as the afterthought, establishing game design concepts before creating a narrative to graft around them. Production for many of today’s big games front-load narrative conception at the start of the process. To this day, that approach eludes Aonuma.

“I’ve never really made a game where you think of the story first and then go into gameplay,” Aonuma said. “First when you think of the gameplay, what you’re trying to think of after that is how you can get players to understand that gameplay.” Anuma said this approach helps teams improve game elements more easily, freed from any adherence to requisites set by the narrative. Instead, the game’s design elements are the outline for narrative to follow.

“The story becomes used as a vessel because it has a beginning and end, and the player moves through it,” Aonuma said. “I think it would actually be kind of difficult to do the reverse and start with the story,
then try to match the gameplay mechanics to that.”

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