If you’re hoping the next Zelda game is a return to the old days of eight dungeons and a linear path through them, well, you probably shouldn’t. IGN spoke with series producer Eiji Aonuma during The Game Awards 2023, after Tears of the Kingdom won best action game, and he suggested there’s an element of “the grass is greener” when people look back fondly on older Zelda games.
“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.”
Which doesn’t sound too promising for fans of traditional Zelda style. Aonuma said his goal is creating more ways for players to chart their own path, so it seems pretty likely the next Zelda – whatever it might be – will follow the same open-world style as Tears of the Kingdom.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though. Aonuma and his team grew quite a bit between Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, as the sequel’s open world felt more alive, with new people, more secrets, and a more complex series of dungeons that took advantage of the open-world, non-linear design in ways that Breath of the Wild couldn’t.
Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF
