Cast your gaze upon Xenoblade Chronicles X and you’d be forgiven for believing that it wasn’t Monolith Soft’s first foray into the realms of HD development. But, it is.

The Wii U exclusive has helped to “lay the groundwork for HD game development” according to executive producer Tetsuya Takahashi, the developer not allowing over ambition to dissuade the importance of building key skills.

“Xenoblade Chronicles X is the first HD project for Monolith Soft, so instead of setting a number of hard-to-achieve targets, we are working on steadily building up key skills. Our goal with this game is first to lay the groundwork for [our] HD game development, so as to not overreach ourselves and cause problems,” Takahashi discussed with EDGE.

He later touched on the scale of the world map in relation to the mechs, revealing: “Dolls, which are what we call these vehicles, are roughly five times the size of a person, so to get the same feel as Xenoblade Chronicles while using a Doll, the map would probably need to be five times as large. It’s actually even bigger than that, but we’ve made sure to design Xenoblade Chronicles X so that players can still feel comfortable navigating the world, despite its vast size.”

Monolith Soft have also addressed complaints over the quest log in Xenoblade Chronicles, now indicating objectives and relevant people on the map – which will also be how the developer will integrate the Wii U GamePad.

“We decided that it would be perfect to use as a navigation device, in the same way that a lot of tablet computers are,” Takahashi explained. “”We’ve put some important features relating to the game system and your objectives in the game onto the GamePad, so I feel that this should create a very user-friendly experience for players.”

Xenoblade Chronicles X will release exclusively for Wii U in 2015.