In Nintendo’s Ask the Developer interview, series producer Eiji Aonuma said many members of the current team have worked mainly on newer Zelda games. He wondered what they might learn by rebuilding the 1998 classic, including ideas they could carry into future entries.

A new team revisits a classic

Aonuma gave the developers room to decide what should change. He said he wanted them to make the remake their own, though he still offered advice during development. He expected the team might make more changes, but was impressed by how carefully they treated the original.

Director HokWai Ng described the team’s approach this way: the visuals could change, but the experience should stay intact. That meant keeping the game’s separate areas instead of turning Hyrule into one seamless map. The team also tried adding warp points, then removed them after finding that they took away from the discoveries players make while traveling.

Updating Hyrule while keeping its character

The art team worked to make Hyrule more detailed without losing the original’s mysterious atmosphere or its unusual characters. Art director Aya Shida said the team thought carefully about details such as Young Link’s clothes. The artists studied materials and experimented with making fabric to imagine what children in Kokiri Forest might wear.

For Aonuma, the remake was a chance for newer developers to spend time with the design of Ocarina of Time in a practical way. Whether that experience influences future Zelda games remains to be seen, but he said it was one reason to revisit the game for the series’ 40th anniversary. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time launches on Nintendo Switch 2 on November 5.