Some players were surprised when Nintendo announced that The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild would be getting a season pass and DLC like most modern AAA games these days.
But others were left in a state of worry by the news, the reason for this being that some Zelda fans feared Nintendo would release a half-baked or incomplete game, and one that would only be worth playing with the added DLC.
So could Breath of the Wild lack the polish and quality that other Zelda games had at release, and only come into its own with the season pass’ extra content?
This won’t be the case according to Nintendo’s Senior Product Marketing Manager Bill Trinen, who recently appeared ion an IGN podcast (which was transcribed by DualShockers), in which he explained Nintendo’s intentions regarding the season pass and DLC for the upcoming Zelda game.
In the video, Trinen says that “I think one of the things that’s unique about the way Nintendo develops games is when we’re working on a game, and certainly just knowing the history of Nintendo games, you guys know that it’s essentially we use every last minute to make the game as good as we possibly can”.
And to assuage Zelda fans’ fears about the DLC being essential to enjoy the game at launch, Trinen also said that “we want people to be able to enjoy exploring this world, and so they started thinking about, ‘Well, if we were going to do DLC, what would we do, how would we do it?’ And you can see that in the fact that it’s not… the DLC is not launching the day after the game or the week after. It’s coming out several months later in the form of the first pack and then several months after that in the form of the second pack”.
So hopefully this means that Zelda’s DLC will be icing on the cake and not mandatory to enjoy Breath of the Wild to the fullest… But regardless of how good or essential the game’s season pass turns out to be, it’s clear that expectations are sky-high for this upcoming Zelda title. And this is a game that could be the poster boy for Nintendo’s eagerly-awaited Switch console too, if it turns out to be as great as most fans of the series are hoping it will be when it launches this month.
Note: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild will be released on March 3, 2016. Available on Nintendo Switch and Wii U.