It’s no secret that Eiji Aonuma can see the points with Ocarina of Time‘s Water Temple. The sequence producer spoke about it when the recreation launched on 3DS, and it continues to hang-out him as we speak, as he’s introduced it up once again in the newest Ask the Developer interview.
“I had some overdue homework: I wanted to do something about the Water Temple I created 28 years ago,” Aonuma-san says of the Switch 2 remake. He touches on all the dungeon’s much-discussed sticking factors (the merchandise menu annoyances, complicated format, and many others.), and confirms that he “had the team make some adjustments in this version”.
Director HokWai Ng expands on these modifications, stating that the Switch 2 remake has “made item toggling much easier” — it’s now mapped to the D-pad, borrowing from the simplicity of the 3DS model — and there have been certain structural tweaks, too: “We also changed some of the walls that made it easy to lose your sense of direction to lattice-style structures, making it possible to see the rooms beyond them and get a better sense of the overall space.”
What’s attention-grabbing is seeing Aonuma-san converse about his intentions behind the dungeon’s unique design. It always gets so bogged down in negativity that it’s good to get a reminder about where it all came from:
When I designed the Water Temple all those years in the past, I needed to create an expertise where merely being underwater was enjoyable. It was a time when there were very few 3D video games that even let gamers go underwater. I take pleasure in freediving, and what I discover fascinating about being underwater is how totally different everything feels. The sounds change, and it feels like you’re in a utterly totally different space. I needed to create a place where gamers could expertise those sensations.
Of course, the 3DS model came with its own Water Temple tweaks, including mapping the Iron Boots toggle to the touchscreen and including directional strains main to the water stage switches on all the partitions.
And yet, there are still those of us on Team NL that love the Water Temple in its unique type — warts and all. It’ll be attention-grabbing to see how the Switch 2 model matches up later this week.