The big thing about the new Zelda game, which won everyone’s hearts and minds when it was finally revealed by Nintendo yesterday, is that it is fully open world, with no overbearing prompts or tutorials interrupting the flow of play. In a lot of ways, this recalls the classic Zelda game on the NES, which just dropped the player into the world, and let them do their thing at their own pace.
The new Zelda game looks like it will be doing the same, giving the player the complete freedom to do what they want, when they want to do it, and how they want to do it. The best part is that this will also mean that players get as much out of the game as they put into it. Like the original Zelda, or modern Souls games, the story will be told to the player passively, and they will get it as they play.
The summation of all of this is that it is actually possible to finish the game without ever completing the story. “Users may not actually get the full story depending on how they play this game and how they strategize and solve puzzles,” producer Eiji Aonuma told Polygon. “Users are able to go to the very end goal without revealing why Link woke up the way he did and where he did. Whether you want to reveal the storyline and find out why Link woke up, or you want to just go straight to the goal, that’s an option totally up to the user.”
Aonuma confirmed that this could, for instance, mean that a player goes straight to the final boss after starting the game, though he also pointed out he is not a fan of that approach.
“Anybody who can go straight to the goal without doing anything else — there’s two possibilities,” Aonuma said. “Either they’re a really good gamer, or they could be somebody that’s a little bit crazy. But it’s not impossible. I created the game like that.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wind launches on Nintendo NX and Wii U next year