Nintendo debated how to announce Zelda: Breath of the Wild DLC

Bill Trinen, best known for being a public translator for Shigeru Miyamoto at events such as E3, has revealed Nintendo deliberated about how and when to announced the DLC for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

Breath of the Wild is the first Zelda game to offer paid DLC content, and while Nintendo was praised for how it added content to Mario Kart 8, it knew not all fans would be happy to hear the full game will now cost $120 ($90 for the main game + $30 for the DLC).

“It was tough, because we actually had a lot of debate in terms of do we announce it, how do we announce it,” Trinen told IGN’s Nintendo Voice Chat podcast under very close watch from Nintendo’s PR minders (via DualShockers). “We use every last minute to make the game as good as we possibly can, and really what that means is that the dev team was working on the main game, finished the main game, and as they’re starting to get to the very end and wrap it up, really they said, ‘You know we’ve made this massive world of Hyrule, we’ve spent a long time building it. It would be a waste to just make one game and have that be it.’

“So they started thinking about: ‘well, if we were going to do DLC, what would we do, how would we do it?’ And you can see that in the fact that … the DLC is not launching the day after the game or the week after. It’s coming out several months later in the form of the first pack and then several months after that in the form of the second pack. And that’s because the content is in development.”

He acknowledged that it would be an easier sell if Nintendo shared more details about what the DLC includes when it was announced, but noted it’s about giving players the option to choose wether or not to buy the additional content.

“If you’re a Zelda fan buying Nintendo Switch at launch and really you’re buying it for Zelda,” he said. “I mean how happy are you to know that hey, I’m going to be able to play more Zelda in this world again later this year?”