The Linguistic Chaos of Zelda and the Challenges of Bringing ‘Outer Wilds’ to Switch

Finally, the highly anticipated Outer Wilds has arrived on the Nintendo Switch, two years after its initial expected release date. We have been eagerly awaiting the chance to experience this indie gem.

Outer Wilds is an incredibly immersive and visually stunning game that received critical acclaim upon its 2019 launch for PC and Xbox. It even won several awards for game design, including Best Game at the BAFTA Game Awards in 2020.

This time loop narrative adventure thrusts you into space, where you must survive for 22 minutes. That’s pretty much all we can say about the game without giving away too much. It’s an experience that demands to be explored with as little information as possible. Our patience has paid off, and now the Outer Wilds: Archaeologist Edition has finally arrived, complete with the Echoes of the Eye DLC.

To celebrate the long-awaited release of the game, we had the opportunity to sit down with the game’s Creative Director, Alex Beachum, along with Mobius Digital Producer Jackie Kreitzberg, and Technical Artist Logan Ver Hoef, to discuss Zelda, the challenges of writing a time loop game, and the reasons for the delayed Switch version.

Note: Answers primarily by Alex Beachum, with help from Jackie Kreitzberg and Logan Ver Hoef.

Nintendo Life: Outer Wilds has been one of our most anticipated games since 2021 and we imagine a lot of Switch gamers will have been actively avoiding it elsewhere while waiting for this version! Can you tell us a little bit about how and why the release timeline changed from its original ‘Summer 2021’ window?

When picking a launch window, we were probably a little too much like the Nomai character, Avens, and should have been a bit more like Daz or Yarrow. There were also complications from the fact we were still working on ‘Echoes of the Eye’ — which we decided to add to the Switch release once the delay had been agreed on. But it really boils down to there being a little too much enthusiasm around the Switch version early on.

There’s a lot of Zelda in Outer Wilds’ DNA and Alex has said that one of the reasons it exists is because Skyward Sword “broke” him. What games did you play during development, and did they change your design approach with Outer Wilds in any way?

There were a lot of games that inspired aspects of the original approach, but once we figured out how to make the “curiosity-driven exploration” work, we were pretty committed to making Outer Wilds its own thing. Our Creative Director, Alex Beachum, specifically held off on playing Breath of the Wild during the last phase of development to avoid being overly influenced by how they handled open-world game design.

With Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom having taken a very different route from Skyward Sword, » …
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