The Legend of Zelda spin-off Hyrule Warriors proved to be quite popular with fans, selling across many different formats like the Wii U, Nintendo 3DS, and Switch. The same can be said of Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, offering the same hack-and-slash gameplay of Koei Tecmo's Warriors franchise while also being a prequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. This allowed fans the chance to play as not only Link, but also various other champions like Revali, Urbosa, and Mipha, in their battle against Calamity Ganon.
The game has seen some post-launch support in 2021, with the Guardian of Remembrance DLC that added new enemies, locations, and even playable characters like Purah and Robbie. There are a lot of large areas in Age of Calamity that required a lot of time to develop, especially in regards to the environmental design. One of the biggest problems that the developers had experienced was with designing the game's grass.
In an interview with some of the core staff involved in the production of Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, they candidly spoke about the game's development, including how many headaches the grass gave them. According to the director Ryouta Matsushita, the problems with the grass stemmed from the desire to reproduce Breath of the Wild's Hyrule Field in both size, scope, and atmosphere. While he believes that it ended up being a faithful recreation, it took "ages" to do so, according to art director Yuu Oohoshi.
According to Oohoshi, it took about half of Age of Calamity's development time to finish touching up the grass, noting it was a huge struggle in creating the atmosphere. This is especially prevalent with Hyrule Field being the very first area that players will battle in, with the developers wanting to stun them with its beauty and atmosphere.
They noted it required consultation with Nintendo to learn how the grass was made in Breath of the Wild. They needed to experiment in order to recreate it, considering there is a lot of grass in the game. The question ended on a humorous note, as the experimentation involved hundreds of staff members of Koei Tecmo to make it work.Matsushita, in a joking manner, said that the whole company was dragged in to solve this grass mess, with members across the CG, background, and technical departments being brought on board to help.
Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity is available now on Nintendo Switch.
Source: Nintendo Everything