Nintendo producers Eiji Aonuma and Hidemaro Fujibayashi discussed the Switch 2 remake of Ocarina of Time with The Verge. The remake keeps much of the 1998 Nintendo 64 game while adding modern graphics and gameplay.
Fujibayashi said the younger developers on the team, some of whom had never played the original, "really embraced the theme of what not to change from the original." He said they were "looking for elegance," focusing on "only what is needed, only what was important in the original."
Aonuma said the production is far larger than it was in 1998. "We used to have maybe just one person designing the backgrounds, and that's something that you couldn't do nowadays," he said. He added that managing the larger teams can be harder.
The team added player freedom to match recent Zelda games. Changes include full camera control and the ability to jump anywhere. Aonuma said the free jump required adjusting the world, and that the change "carries something forward from Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom."
Aonuma said the new graphics aim to "bring out details of the world that people weren't able to see in the original," which he said the team wanted to do but could not achieve on the earlier hardware. Navi, the guide fairy, remains in the remake, but her chatter has been reduced.