Miyamoto Dishes On Zelda

As both NaviFairy and Wootini reported during E3 at a roundtable, Miyamoto showed off some artwork and discussed the next Zelda a little bit. I know many people are as excited to hear about another Zelda as they were about the new Metroid coming out, so it seemed strange that the news of the Zelda game wasn't in the Nintendo press conference. Luckily, Chris Kohler, finder of Fruit Brute cellphones, over at Wired got an interview with Miyamoto, and after some questions about the sequel to Mario Galaxy, Miyamoto had plenty to say as to why Zelda was kept rather hushed at E3:

Wired.com: Why did you decide to show that image from Zelda at a Q&A session, instead of the press conference?

Miyamoto: There are a couple of reasons. One is that personally I think the videogame industry has adopted a bit of a bad habit in this idea of announcing games long before they're ever going to release. I don't necessarily think it's the most healthy of habits . . .

The other reason, relating to Zelda in particular, is that the development of Zelda has been focused strictly on the gameplay structure at this point. We haven't devoted much in the way of efforts to things like graphical representation, and story, and those types of production elements. Because of that, we thought it was just more valuable to continue have the team focus their energies on creating what will be a very entertaining gameplay system, rather than have them waste their energies creating a trailer to announce a game at E3 very far in advance.

Well, that's big of Miyamoto to stand up and say that they knew the new Zelda is probably sometime off in the distance as far as release goes, and so they didn't think they should announce the game too prematurely. The other big news around the new Zelda is that it might be using the new Wii Motion Plus as part of its gameplay, which usually leaves people with a variety of feelings and it seems as though Mr. Miyamoto had some himself:

Wired.com: You've mentioned that you're not sure if the game's going to be MotionPlus or not MotionPlus -- why not make it exclusive? Doesn't it handicap you if you have to make two different control schemes?

Miyamoto: Of course, we don't yet know how things are going to go. We're doing our best with what we've created with Wii Sports Resort. We feel confident that it's a strong product and that it will help to really drive the install base of Wii Motion Plus. Hopefully with something like Wii Sports Resort, people will feel like they want to have two Wii MotionPlus units in the house to be able to play that game. But the goal at this point is that we would make Wii MotionPlus required in order to play Zelda.

The bigger hurdle for us is not really whether people have a Wii MotionPlus or don't have it, it's whether or not the experience is one where people will think they want to have a Wii Motion Plus in order to experience it.

So in the end, it looks like they are really wanting to have the Motion Plus be an integral and enjoyable part of the new Zelda experience, which is not simple task to be done. It looks like once they get that down, then they'll focus on the way the game looks, so they'll have some nice shiny trailer to show you in the future. For more of the interview with Miyamoto, jump over to the Wired article below.

Q&A: Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto on Mario, Zelda, Project Natal and More [Wired]