Next Zelda Game Won’t be a Direct Sequel to Tears of the Kingdom, Series Producer Says

It’s not very often that a new mainline Zelda title is a direct follow-up to a previous instalment, with Majora’s Mask having been the last one (not counting the handheld titles) to do so until Tears of the Kingdom launched earlier this year. And whenever the next Zelda title arrives, it is going to be an entirely new thing once again, as per series producer Eiji Aonuma.

Echoing similar statements from earlier in the year where he said the next Zelda game is going to be something “completely new”, in a recent interview with Game Informer, Aonuma said that making “a sequel to a sequel” would be “getting a little bit wild”, and that the next Zelda instalment is unlikely to be another direct follow-up.

“As I’ve mentioned previously, with Tears of the Kingdom, we were seeking to build on top of the world we created with Breath of the Wild and really exhaust the possibilities of what we could put into that world,” he said. “I think it is – to use a bit of a term – an apotheosis, or the final form of that version of The Legend of Zelda. In that regard, I don’t think that we’ll be making a direct sequel to a world such as that that we’ve created.”

In the same interview, Aonuma and Tears of the Kingdom director Hidemaro Fujibayashi have also said the Ultrahand ability from the 2023 title won’t be coming back in future games.

Previously, the developers have also said that Tears of the Kingdom won’t receive DLC, owing to the fact that they feel they’ve got everything they can out of the ideas they had for the game and its world.