Nintendo Defends, Explains The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild's DLC Pass

Last week, Nintendo announced a $20 DLC Pass for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Some questioned and criticized this move. Now, Nintendo has responded.

Nintendo's Bill Trinen recently caught up with IGN to discuss the DLC pass and the reasoning behind it.

"It was tough, because we actually had a lot of debate in terms of do we announce it, how do we announce it," he said, as reported by DualShockers. "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 really what that means is that the dev team was working on the main game, finished the main game, and as they're starting to get to the very end and wrap it up, really they said, 'You know we've made this massive world of Hyrule, we've spent a long time building it. It would be a waste to just make one game and have that be it.'"

Trinen added: "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. And that's because the content is in development."

Trinen went on to say the announcement might have gone over better if Nintendo was able to share more details about what fans can expect from the DLC. He added that Nintendo's DLC plan for Breath of the Wild is not unlike that of Mario Kart 8's, in that fans can buy Breath of the Wild knowing that more content is in the pipeline.

"If you're a Zelda fan buying Nintendo Switch at launch and really you're buying it for Zelda, I mean how happy are you to know that hey, I'm going to be able to play more Zelda in this world again later this year."

For more on Breath of the Wild's DLC, check out the video above and GameSpot's previous coverage here.

Breath of the Wild comes out on March 3 as a launch title for the Nintendo Switch. The game is also coming to Wii U that day--and it could be the last first-party game Nintendo releases for it.

For lots more on Breath of the Wild, you can read all our written coverage and watch every video here.