First Breath of the Wild DLC Details Revealed (April Fools)
Well this is a nice surprise. Nintendo revealed some new details about their upcoming Breath of the Wild DLC, and it seems that the previously mentioned Hard Mode is a bit more interesting than we initially thought.
Bit is the right word because what makes hard mode hard is that you have to play as an entirely different character: 8-bit Link. This isn’t just any old 8-bit Link though. If you watched any of those excellent “Making of” videos Nintendo released on their YouTube channel, you may have seen that early on in the development process for Breath of the Wild, the team created an 8-bit version of the game to mess with the physics and stuff. It’s actually very impressive-looking. The internet at large was quick to let Nintendo know via every flavor of social media imaginable that they would love to play that game, and it seems like they listened, at least to a certain degree.
The details on how exactly this character will play are pretty sparse. If you’ve played Breath of the Wild, you know that Link is far more athletic than he’s ever been, and translating his enormous move set to a relatively simplistic sprite could be quite a challenge. It seems that those limitations are exactly what is going to make Hard Mode so hard. Can you still climb mountains? Ride horses? Use the paraglider? We don’t know for sure yet, but it’s going to be exciting to find out. What’s interesting here is that it if the screenshots are to be believed, 8-bit Link doesn’t seem to be a polygonal character, but rather an actual 2D sprite running around in this 3D Hyrule. I imagine that’s going to provide more than its fair share of issues, but if anyone can pull it off, it’s Nintendo.
Breath of the Wild’s DLC has been a pretty controversial issue, but honestly, if the rest of what they have to offer is as cool as this, I’m totally good with it.