Breath of the Wild 2 co-developer goes on huge hiring spree

Monolith Soft, one of the developers working on Breath of the Wild 2, has announced a “big increase” of staff, with almost 40 new positions across its Tokyo and Kyoto studios.

One of Nintendo’s biggest developers, Monolith Soft, has announced on social media that it’s getting even bigger, with a huge staff expansion at its Kyoto office. Monolith Soft is best known for its Xenoblade series, but the team has also been a co-developer on a laundry list of amazing Nintendo games including Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Splatoon 2, and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Now the team is working on the highly anticipated Breath of the Wild 2 and many of these new roles at the company make direct reference to the Zelda series, so it seems like development is really ramping up.

There are nearly 40 positions up for grabs at Monolith Soft at time of writing, and the job roles on offer are pretty diverse too, with positions available for programmers, artists, designers, and management positions which suggests this is a pretty large expansion of the studio at all levels.

We’ve still had no official word on the release date of Breath of the Wild 2, though there have been rumours that it was due to launch in Q2 2021, which would mean that the game is only a few months away. If that were the case, then it's unlikely Monolith Soft would be hiring for positions on this title so close to release. These job listings suggest that either Breath of the Wild 2 is further out than we thought, or that Monolith Soft is working on further Zelda games or DLC for Breath of the Wild 2. It's also possible that this is an attempt to ramp up development in order to accelerate the process, but we'll have to wait for more official word to find out for sure.

Breath of the Wild 2 was announced during E3 2019 for the Nintendo Switch. Zelda games don’t usually get canonical sequels like this, but Zelda series Producer Eiji Aonuma explained that the sequel was born from the team having too many ideas for DLC.

See what else Nintendo has up its sleeves with our roundup of upcoming Switch games.