Nintendo loves experimenting with the Legend of Zelda franchise, and it’s not rare to see new instalments focusing on completely new mechanics and ideas, only for the series to move on to the next thing with the next game. And it seems that’s a trend that’s set to continue.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’s big star of the show was the new Ultrahand ability, which allows players to stick a deluge of elements in the world together to design whatever contraptions, structures, weapons, or objects they can think up. But in spite of how well-received the ability and the game in general were, the Zelda series’ leads seem to have no intention of bringing it back for future instalments.
Speaking in a recent interview with Game Informer, Tears of the Kingdom’s director Hidemaro Fujibayashi said, “Every time we’re making a Zelda title, we want to create something new. If, for example, there was any continuation of Tears of the Kingdom and we were to bring in, say, Ultrahand, then I think to us, it would feel like, ‘Well, we’re just bringing in Tears of the Kingdom as is.’ What we want to do from a game creator’s perspective is create something new. From that perspective, I don’t think we’ll be seeing Ultrahand in every Zelda game or anything in the future.”
Series producer Eiji Aonuma echoed that sentiment, saying that the development team already got the most out of all the ideas it put into Tears of the Kingdom- which is why it isn’t getting DLC either.
“When you’re talking about Ultrahand, that is a really core idea for Tears of the Kingdom and I think it represents our approach of kind of putting everything we could into this game,” Aonuma said. “You know, first putting all of our ideas in and then being very selective about what we wanted to remain, removing all of the parts that didn’t make sense or didn’t fit perfectly. This game, then, is the result of that selection process. This time, you’ll see that there is no DLC because of that process. We created what we wanted to create and felt that it was complete in that fashion. So from that aspect as well, I think we definitely won’t be including Ultrahand in titles going forward.”
In the same interview, Fujibayashi also said that the next Zelda title is unlikely to be direct sequel to Tears of the Kingdom. Meanwhile, Aonuma has also previously said that the next Zelda game, whatever it turns out to be, is going to be something “completely new”.