In an interview with IGN, Shigeru Miyamoto has detailed some of the reasons why the game has seen such significant delayed. Obviously, the main reason for the delay was the eventual decision to release the game on both the Nintendo NX and the Wii U. The second, which we previously hadn’t heard was the physics engine.
“It’s complicated because as we’re developing this — obviously development of NX started a while ago — and unfortunately, I’m sorry, but the development of this game took a lot longer than expected. We really felt like we would be able to get it done last year, but there was a lot of struggle with using the physics engine, so that’s why it took a long time.”
Eiji Aonuma, series producer spoke about bringing the game to the NX in the same interview.
“From the beginning we were thinking of releasing this title on both platforms. With Twilight Princess, I was looking at, this [then-new] platform called Wii and I had more of an outsider objective view of, ‘Oh this is coming out’.
But for this one I was slightly more involved with NX and just judging on the timing of development. When we were going to finish this, we thought it might be fun to have that available for NX as well. I don’t see it as something too unfortunate. I think it’s nice to have a single title that can be played on two different platforms.”
Source: IGN