One of the things that many people forget about The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild is that the game wasn’t meant to be on the Nintendo Switch. It was originally developed for the Wii U and then was ported to the Switch as its initial launch title. There was a now infamous tech demo for the game featuring Link shown many years prior, and many wondered if the game would ever come. Well, it did, in two versions, and that led to certain restrictions on the game, believe it or not. But those restrictions won’t weigh down the upcoming Tears Of The Kingdom.
Nintendo has been dropping parts of a special interview with the Tears of the Kingdom team, and in the third part that was released today, they talked about growing the world without remaking it. The team noted that it was “always the plan” to keep the Hyrule from the previous game but do more with it. Although they created a special version of the realm before, they were restricted in what they could do based on the Wii U’s technology and the little time they had with the Switch. But now, they’ve had years to push things forward. As team member Takuhiro Dohta noted, it was all about building things up and unleashing their many ideas on how to expand Hyrule:
“We began by compiling and implementing ideas we couldn’t include in the previous title. We wouldn’t have been able to do so had we made a completely new world, so developing in the same setting as the previous game was significant in this sense as well.”
Fellow teammate Satoru Takizawa noted that in the first game, you could only do certain things with walls or cliffs. But now? There’s potential for so much more:
“I think that players who find a cliffside cave in this game might start wondering, “Is there one in the cliffs over there too?” When a place – even one that’s already familiar – is augmented with something of worth, you begin to see the world in a different light. Even as the game’s developers, we started seeing the landscape in a different way while working on the game. I believe the way players explore Hyrule will change too.”
The team further noted that they wanted to do their best to “seamlessly” connect the world above and below so that players would want to see it all from different perspectives. We’ll see how that goes when the game releases on May 12th!
