First, we looked at the one thing that received the most negative feedback, and that was the movement of the camera with the point control. We tried fine tuning the rotation speed and the sensor area, but we weren’t able to get it to a point where anyone was simply able to pick up the game and control it comfortably. In addition, the fundamentals of the gameplay is such that the player does not actively have to think about pointing. Pointing is key when the player is choosing an item. So if when that transition happens, the pointer is in a camera rotation area, the camera would rotate all of the sudden, and we couldn’t avoid confusing the user in this way. Please watch this movie of the pointer control after we changed it. I think you can see the icons marking the right and left movement of the control stick. The result was that we decided to just kept the vertical camera control using the pointer because it doesn’t rotate and returning lateral movement to the control stick. When we switched to this mode, we decided to add text that told the player when the pointer was outside the detectable range, making it so that the player does not perform any action until the pointer is back in range. In the end, we were not able to fulfill Miyamoto’s wish for uniform camera control completely because a game like Zelda involves switching between first-person and third-person camera perspectives and so it’s something that we cannot get around. But for our traditional FPS, which primarily uses the first-person view, it should be more intuitive for the user. He would be ecstatic if developers creating games like that would adopt Miyamoto’s vision.

Next, we addressed the plus control pad item controls. As many of the item controls in Zelda require that the player hold and release, we thought that while a player was pressing and holding in one direction, they would inevitably press another, causing a faulty button press. This problem of key assignment and control was one that we had a really hard time resolving, but we knew the only way we could have players swap items was to use the plus control pad. If we were to change the press-and-hold item control to a switch, it would negatively affect the gameplay and make the game less fun. We felt like we were stuck. Have you ever experienced anything like this? We could have made the decision to give up one thing or another, but we decided to separate the controls to alleviate the problem. In other words, I assigned the hold function to the B trigger button, and used the plus control pad as a place where players could queue up other items and swap that item out with the one assigned to the B button just by pressing the corresponding direction. These changes minimized the mis-entered data and made it easy and comfortable for users to point while holding down the B trigger button to control the item.