The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild reinvented Nintendo’s premiere franchise as massive open world experience that places little to no limits on players, and its follow-up, Tears of the Kingdom, pushed the series further in that direction. And though both games are obviously among the greatest games to have ever been made, there’s still a healthy contingent of the Zelda series’ fanbase that wonders whether the older, more structured, more linear design style of prior instalments is something that we’re ever going to see again.
If you fall in that group, you probably won’t like what series producer Eiji Aonuma has to say on the matter. Speaking recently with IGN, Aonuma talked about how emphasizing player freedom above all else and not demanding specifically prescribed progression has become central to The Legend of Zelda’s development strategy, calling the more linear experiences “games of the past”.
“Games where you need to follow a specific set of steps or complete tasks in a very set order are kind of the games of the past,” he said. “Whereas currently the games of today are ones in which that can accept a player’s own decisions and give them the freedom to flexibly proceed through the game, and the game will allow for that. So I’m in complete agreement with that as our design philosophy, but as the producer, I do have to admit making games that way always carries with it additional development costs. And that is something I have to think about.”
When asked specifically about the not insignificant demand for a Zelda game that goes back to the series’ more structured style from the pre-Breath of the Wild days, Aonuma once again questioned its merits in comparison to a much more open-ended experience, but added that he does understand that there’s nostalgia for the old style.
“I do think we as people have a tendency to want the thing that we don’t currently have, and there’s a bit of a grass is greener mentality,” Aonuma said. “But I also think that with the freedom players have in the more recent games in the series… there still is a set path, it just happens to be the path that they chose. So I think that that is one thing I kind of like to remind myself about the current games that we’re making.
“But also, it’s interesting when I hear people say those things because I am wondering, ‘Why do you want to go back to a type of game where you’re more limited or more restricted in the types of things or ways you can play?’ But I do understand that desire that we have for nostalgia, and so I can also understand it from that aspect.”
Of course, it’s worth acknowledging that it wasn’t that long ago that we got a more traditional Zelda game in the form of 2019’s Link’s Awakening remake. Perhaps another Zelda remake in the future could serve as a welcome window to the series’ past?
As for the next mainline Zelda game, while it’s obviously not going to roll around for some time to come, its developers have made it clear that it’s going to be something completely different from recent instalments (so don’t expect to see Ultrahand again), and that it won’t be direct sequel to Tears of the Kingdom.