Nintendo ran a livestream of over two hours for their Treehouse live event for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.
Since the event went live, they have prepared some snippets of the gameplay demos. We’ll share a brief summary of what happened overall, including what details they revealed in gameplay.
And if you were worried, I can assure you the stream had zero story spoilers. They did want to spoil the many new gameplay elements that were added in, so if you didn’t want to know about that, this is your spoiler warning.
Everything starts with a brief intro with Camille Salazar Hadaway at Nintendo New York, where she stood next to the promotional Link statue, with the midnight launch line waiting outside.
The first gameplay demo came from Sam, Kindra, and Jose. They showed off the Ultrahand and Fuse powers at Great Sky Island, the starting point of the game which was also famously revealed by Eiji Aonuma on a Nintendo Direct. Many of the things shown in this demo were also covered by previews made outside Nintendo, but also serves as a great introduction. You can watch just that demo below.
The stream then jumped back to Nintendo New York with Camille and Nate. They showed off an LED billboard ad for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom on the side of a bus, something potentially even more impressive than the bus ads that fans have already seen going around, as you can see on the tweet below.
Camille and Nate then talked to the midnight crowd and shared some goodies for the waiting fans.
On the second gameplay demo, Kaye, Gabriel and Billy returned to Great Sky Island. Billy demonstrated some alternate inventions and methods to pass the same river that Aonuma crossed in his Nintendo Direct demo. Billy also had some interesting ‘overkill’ methods to take care of enemies, from a safe distance of course. You can watch just that demo below.
Back in Nintendo New York, Camille talked to The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’s director, Hidemaro Fujibayashi. Fujibayashi shared the dev team’s intent to give players a clean slate so that they could enjoy that feeling of exploring the open world Hyrule once again.
Sam, Kindra, and Jose returned to demonstrate exploration in the underground caves. These details might be too spoilery so I won’t share too much here. There are new enemies and gameplay elements to contend with that don’t exist anywhere else. They also demonstrated the Autobuild ability, which may be the first time it was previewed. You can watch just that video below.
Back in New York, Camille got to interview series producer Eiji Aonuma. Aonuma shared the surprising revelation that many Japanese were taking a ‘Zelda break’ so that they could have the time to play the game.
In the final gameplay preview, Kaye, Gabriel and Billy demonstrated the Raids feature, which we got a preview of in the game’s trailers. This is your ability to fight with Hylians against Ganon’s forces. It’s a very fun feature but is also clearly limited to a few sections. Once again, if you don’t want to be spoiled too much, I won’t describe it here, but you can watch just that preview below. Kindra signs them off for the show.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is now available on the Nintendo Switch. You can watch the full stream below (the show starts a little after twenty minutes in)
