We hoped it would happen and we were not disappointed: Nintendo showed new footage of the upcoming sequel to Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, including some new gameplay. Not only did we get to see the new character designs (albeit not in great detail) but we also got a tentative release date of 2022. While the footage was not very comprehensive, I suspect Nintendo knew fans would be beyond disappointed if another E3 went by without us seeing anything.
Nintendo opened their E3 event with a bit of a troll move — or at least, that’s what it felt like. The first thing we saw was Ganondorf, only for it to swiftly be revealed that the game they were showing us was Smash Bros — Kazuya Mishima was making his entry in the most dastardly way possible, pitching his fellow character into a volcano. Later in the show, Yoshiaki Koizumi introduced DLC for Age of Calamity as being the last thing they had to show us, and Eiji Aonuma even played along when he appeared on-stage, right up until the final moment.
The footage opened with what appeared to be Link skydiving and Zelda falling into a chasm. There’s not much to surmise about the story from the trailer, though we do get some gameplay footage of Link fighting off a variety of enemies with some familiar abilities and some not-so-familiar. We can also see something happening to Zelda’s castle at the end of the trailer.
Aonuma added that the game is still deep in development, and implored the fans for patience. The developers are aiming for a 2022 release, but can’t be more specific than that. It’s worth noting that they still haven’t come up with a name for the game. The trailer is still referring to it as the “Sequel to Breath of the Wild.”