Nintendo completely changed the game when it made The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Not only did it revolutionize the franchise, but it changed gaming as a whole. Some modern classics wouldn’t exist without it. It also totally redefined a Zelda game by taking the training wheels off and sending players out into a vast, wide-open world.
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Gone was the 2D top-down style. Gone were the linear storytelling and gameplay. There was nothing off limits. If you wanted to head straight for the final boss, you theoretically could. Never before had a Zelda game been like that, and the team then doubled down with Tears of the Kingdom six years later.
While they were met with near-universal praise, not everyone loved BotW and TotK. Some hope for a day when games similar to The Wind Waker or A Link to the Past are relevant again. But for the next era of Zelda, Nintendo shouldn’t revert back to the old ways and instead needs to keep the world wide open.
Whatever Is Next For Zelda Must Be Open World
There’s no telling where The Legend of Zelda is going next, but we are fairly certain that the Tears of the Kingdom version of Hyrule is being retired. Whatever’s next will be brand-new. It also needs to be open-world.
Pivoting to the open world was the perfect move for this franchise. It opened the games up to a much bigger audience, allowing exploration, creativity, and fun that had previously been hard to find in this series, as great as it was.
Calls to return to the olden days mount, though. But given how brilliant and successful the current formula has been, it’s imperative to stick with it. Games need to evolve and move forward, not go backward.
Open-world, nonlinear games tend to do pretty well in today’s landscape. They’re a dime a dozen, but the good ones really stand out. They’re typically more popular and pretty well-liked, so there’s a built-in player base already.
The alternative is to go backwards developmentally and evolutionarily. The franchise has evolved over time, going from 2D top-down adventures to fully-fledged 3D outings. Then, it evolved again, going from those limited, linear 3D titles to fully open-world options.
Echoes of Wisdom kind of merged those two, although it still had things laid out a little more linearly, with some places being impossible to get to until later in the game. There was a little bit of freedom to choose which dungeons you did in comparison to others, but there was still a progression about half the time.
Maybe that’s the ideal solution, and Echoes of Wisdom was a testing ground. That would give the open-world gamers the freedom they love to go and do almost anything they want while also keeping things a little more linear for those who complained about the lack of structure in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom.
However, there is really no appeasing both sides of this debate. Those who adore the old-school Zelda games are not going to be convinced by anything that’s not strict, linear, and focused almost entirely on dungeons. Those who appreciate the new titles won’t love the lack of freedom and creativity.
So the developers have to choose. While this doesn’t set it in stone, Zelda head Eiji Aonuma said he isn’t sure why fans would even want to go back to the “limited” gameplay of older titles. He called them “games of the past,” according to GamesRadar, so it looks like the open world is going to stay.
This is a good thing, although it shouldn’t preclude the team from doing different things. Echoes of Wisdom is a perfect example of a smaller, more classic Zelda game that came out right after Tears of the Kingdom, and it proved that these smaller drops can be successful and give other styles of gaming a chance to see the light of day.
But as it pertains to the big-budget releases, there shouldn’t be another Ocarina of Time but rather another Breath of the Wild. It’s more creative, more freeing, and fits the modern style of gaming much better. The older style had its time, but evolution in gaming and specifically in this series has moved past that.
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Image courtesy of Lucasfilm
