| Jumpin said: ... |
1- The Topic is on Monolith's involvement with the Zelda series hence why even SS got brought up.
2- I already pointed that out to begin with.
3- True they make more use of verticality although BOTW has less of that than Xenoblade.
4- No I stand by this one Aonuma and co created a 2d version of BOTW to get an idea of what they want in practice, they would have had a concept of what the map would be and where key locations would be before an assets are created.
5- If the map was the main attraction than XCX would surely be within the same region of reception as BOTW as it shares the same map design approach, fact is the map was one of numerous elements from sandbox mechanics, full freedom of how you want to play, A.I interactions, physics manipulation etc...
6- Fair enough.
5000 plus is the total employee count with NCL having over 2000 people these numbers from your source, EPD is the combined count of all EAD departments, SPD teams etc... after the restructuring in 2015 and make up the lion's share of the numbers. When you factor in EAD and SPD includes almost all the first party developers, programmers, software developer it's clear that's where most of the numbers are from. For reference back in 2004:
https://www.nsidr.com/archive/profile-nintendo-ead/4
EAD had 1302 people total and they've not only grown since then due to the demands of development but have merged with SPD another large department.
As I mention Monolith did great with their part but the was still a lot to do in making a functioning game with the appeal of BOTW it's not taking anything away from them as they've found a key role with in the company with their designs but it trivializes many other key aspects in BOTW suggesting it's down mainly to map which I find to be untrue.
Last edited by Wyrdness - on 04 April 2019
