Nintendo Defends DLC Expansion Pass For ‘The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild’

One of the biggest surprises about “The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild” is that it will be the first in the franchise to have a DLC Expansion Pass. Nintendo’s senior product marketing manager Bill Trinen defended the move to paid DLC in a recent interview.

“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,” Trinen told IGN.

“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 continued by explaining that Nintendo started thinking about how they would do “The Breath of the Wild” DLC. The first DLC will come out several months after the game’s release, while the second one will come out a few months after the first. Trinen says that this is because the content is in development.

He also compared Nintendo’s approach with the “Mario Kart 8” DLC. For that instance, Nintendo’s goal was to provide gamers the option to buy the additional content alongside the game itself when they walk in a store.

For “The Legend of Zelda,” Trinen said it was basically letting fans know that more content is in the pipeline, as pointed out by GameSpot. “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,” Trinen said.

“The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild” will be released on March 3 for $59.99. The game’s Expansion Pass will be available for $19.99 with two DLC packs. The first DLC pack is scheduled to be released this summer, while the second pack will be out sometime during the holiday season.