Among the blistering craziness that has been E3 this week, a rather interesting interview with Eiji Aonuma surfaced on Eurogamer. In it, the foster daddy of the Zelda franchise discusses the two throwback games coming out this year, as well as revealing a few interesting bits about the process behind their all-new installment. Most specifically, he was asked from what games he was taking inspiration as he prepared a Zelda title for a new generation.

"Skyrim! [For some reason mention of Bethesda's fantasy epic tickles him, and he laughs.] Obviously I play other games, and I'm curious what Zelda fans like about the Skyrim experience. Maybe there are some Zelda fans who are looking for something similar out of a Zelda game. But I don't look at the technology that made these games possible. I don't look at what's happening in the game, but how it made me feel, what in the game moved me, and how I can bring out those same emotions in players who play my games. My intent isn't to copy them, but those are the things that stay with you as a player. It's not what you see but how the game makes you feel that makes you feel closer to the experience. It's more about the feeling and expression of emotions in the game, and I do take that into consideration when working on my own projects. It's like the difference between someone who takes a picture and looks at that picture when drawing a painting, and someone who sees something, keeps it in their head and then tries to recreate that."

- Eiji Aonuma -

http://www.zeldainformer.com/news/aonuma-looking-to-capture-the-feeling-of-skyrim-with-new-zelda

hype

"We don't care about too much about what other companies are doing" - nintendo

I see nintendo first party cares about what other companies are doing/sarcasm

anyhow, that's great, with the power of the WII u, nintendo should be able to push an experience beyond what skyrim was capable of on current gen

You know, they talked about Sony/Microsoft?

Every developer gets inspirations from something. Skyrim was a huge success for a RPG. And they saw that.

I also think this means open world again. The reason why Skyward Sword isn't higher placed in my Zelda List is cause of the repetetive overworld.....

Zelda as an Action RPG?

I would buy it. Give Link all sorts of sweet gear and skills. Huge sweeping fields and labyrinthine dungeons. Epic, fast paced, reaction based boss fights. A real story.

In other words I'd prefer they make it Skyrim with Ys influence.

Well, I hope that the push of the experience doesn't solely depend on the hardware's capabilities. Zelda is all about gameplay and level-design. TES-games define themselves mainly through their huge scale and freedom. I honestly don't think that a huge landscape (like Skyrim) would fit into a Zelda game. It would force repetitive design (which you will find a lot in TES-games).

Interested to see how that turns out.

Just don't capture the amount of bugs in the game.

That would be epic.

Cross-platforming taking new heights!!! XD
This is actually cool.