The caption "Table go vroom-vroom" is a small taste of what a player can do in The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, the latest game in Nintendo.
Echoes of Wisdom focuses on finding new ways to use objects in the world. It builds on Zelda's ability to copy enemies and objects, repositioning them at will. In the early days of the game's development, the developers were exploring different ways to play. This included the ability to edit dungeons by copying and pasting items like doors or candles, giving players the opportunity to create their own game — and their own cheats.
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When series producer Eiji Aonuma tried the game, he had a different opinion. “While it’s fun to create your own dungeon and let others try it out,” he said in a recent Ask the Developer post on Nintendo’s website, “it’s not at all bad to place objects that can be copied and pasted into the game world, creating gameplay where they can be used to fight enemies.”
So Echoes of Wisdom isn't just a dungeon crawler. Like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, its ability to create improvised solutions and items allows players to quickly discover original ways to traverse the world and conquer its many levels. In some cases, using items in such original ways almost feels excessive.
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One of Echoes of Wisdom's most useful items is also its simplest: a bed with a brown frame. Players have quickly adopted the use of beds for transportation — stacking a pair together to create bridges or ladders. During a battle, Zelda can sleep and regain health while summoned monsters fight on her behalf. In one particularly inspiring example, one player placed Zelda on top of a bed and summoned an enemy, creating gusts of wind that sent the bed flying into the air. Tables are just as useful, especially when you want to trap some guards in their own prison.
On Reddit, gamers are sharing innovative creations that allow them to bypass areas and the laws of gravity. One user developed several variations of flying machines, using a crow, a rock, and an enemy that creates gusts of wind, without the need for a bed. In the game's water temple, where players must gradually raise the water level to reach the top, an enterprising adventurer figured out how to bypass this process by carefully stacking water stones—creating a speaker that forms a cube of water in which Zelda can swim and move vertically.
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Despite the creativity of these solutions, these exploits play squarely into Nintendo's hands. While echoes may seem like a neurosis of Tears' mechanics, allowing players to build flame-spewing phalluses, Nintendo is giving them the ability to be "naughty." As director Tomomi Sano put it, the challenge is for players to find ways to use echoes so cleverly that they seem to be cheating the system.
Flying beds may not be exactly what Sano had in mind when she mentioned it, but they highlight the magic of gaming: the thrill of escaping limitations. Speedrunners have been discovering unusual ways to play games in innovative ways for decades.
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Old cheat codes allowed players to circumvent the rules of a game to their advantage. Echoes of Wisdom gives players the ability to, quite literally, capture some of that magic. Sometimes, the solution is simply to knock over a bed!
Source: wired
