Twenty-eight years later, Eiji Aonuma is finally handing in his homework. In the third chapter of Nintendo's Ask the Developer interview for the Nintendo Switch 2 remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Aonuma, the remake's producer, gets to the dungeon everyone remembers, and not fondly.
"I had some overdue homework: I wanted to do something about the Water Temple I created 28 years ago," Aonuma says in the interview. Because the dungeon became well known for its difficulty, he says, he had the team make some adjustments.
What happened to the Water Temple
Aonuma explains that the original idea was a good one. "When I designed the Water Temple all those years ago, I wanted to create an experience where simply being underwater was fun," he says, adding that very few 3D games at the time even let players go underwater. He also mentions that he enjoys freediving, and wanted to capture how different sounds and space feel below the surface.
The problem, in his words, was the dungeon's complex structure and all the item toggling, which meant opening the menu again and again and losing track of where you were and which way you were facing. "We addressed those issues in this version," he says.
HokWai Ng, whom Kotaku identifies as the remake's director, gives the specifics: item toggling is "much easier," and some of the walls that made it easy to lose your sense of direction are now lattice-style structures, so you can see the rooms beyond them. Elsewhere in the game's dungeons, Ng says the team kept the original mechanisms but placed objects so players can more intuitively tell which way to go.
Kotaku, which reported on the interview, recalls that in the original Link couldn't swim and had to equip and unequip the Iron Boots through the menu to sink and float. It notes that the 3DS version had already made boot-switching easier.
Link can jump now (and that caused work)
The same chapter explains the remake's biggest control change. Ng says auto-jump is gone: in the original there was no jump button, and Link only leapt in specific places. Now he jumps anywhere with one button press, using controls carried over from more recent Zelda games.
Aonuma admits auto-jump was "in some ways, convenient from a development standpoint." Removing it, he says, means you "need to anticipate all kinds of player behaviour" and adjust the environment to match, and the team's first reaction was, "Are we sure about this?" Developer Shida adds that Adult Link and Young Link jump slightly different distances, which made balancing gaps tricky. VGC picked up on the same exchange, reporting that the change shaped much of the rest of the game's design.
There are a few more tweaks for players with muscle memory:
- Jump Attack. The remake uses the two-step approach from Breath of the Wild, jump then attack, according to developer Taguchi. Aonuma says he couldn't get the hang of it, so the team added a single-button option too. Both work.
- Dashing. Ng says you can still spam Roll Attack across Hyrule Field, or hold the button to dash.
- Camera. The camera is now freely controllable. Taguchi says the team worried that players could lose their sense of direction, and Ng says they made various adjustments to make it easier to understand where you're headed.
- Gohma. The first boss now guards its weak point with the arms on its head whenever it can't be hurt, Taguchi says, making the timing clearer.
The chapter ends with Ng imagining parents telling their kids, "You know, your Dad got stuck in the Water Temple plenty of times back in the day," and Aonuma predicting the kids will answer that it's not that hard.
The remake is due on Nintendo Switch 2 on November 5, according to Kotaku.
Riley's take: There's something lovely about a designer publicly owning the level that launched a thousand forum threads. The lattice walls are the clever bit: instead of flattening the puzzle, Nintendo is letting you see the shape of it. Whether the new swimming and free jumping change how those puzzles play is something only the finished game will answer.
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