Direct sequels are not often found in the Legend of Zelda franchise, and the sequels that use the same setting as their direct predecessor are even less common. Nevertheless, this is exactly what will be in the future The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Despite the fact that there will be many new elements in the form of heavenly islands and changes in the very ground world, the Hairul map will be the same as in Breath of the Wild 2017.
According to a team of developers, the use of the same setting and the introduction of new gameplay elements to it has always been an important part of the concept of the sequel, about which the developer team members spoke in a recent interview.
According to the producer of the Aiji Aonum series, after the release of Breath of the Wild, the developer team wanted to work on a direct continuation in order to implement new ideas for using its setting. When asked whether the team considered the possibility of creating a game in a completely new world, he replied: "No, not at all. Although the previous game, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, has its own conclusion, we began to come up with new ideas that we wanted to realize in this already implemented version of Hairul, so our direction in creating the continuation did not change".
Hidamaro Fujibabi, director Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, added that preserving the same setting has always been the main part of the idea of the sequel from the very beginning.
Just as in some place that you know along and down, we understand where everything is in Hirul from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and thanks to this we considered it possible to create a new gameplay. For this reason, in the initial sentence, we clearly indicated "The setting will not change" as an important concept. Even when I shared this with the members of the team, there were no objections, and from that moment we all agreed with this idea.
The production designer Satoru Takizawa spoke about the difficulties associated with maintaining the balance between the world does not seem too familiar, and at the same time not to change it too radically, which, in his opinion, was even a more difficult task than creating something then completely new from scratch.
I acutely felt that introducing something new into the same world is actually more difficult than creating something from scratch. Although this is the same world, we want the players to experience it with a new sense of surprise. Therefore, in order to achieve this, we had to take a world initially consisting of things that we developed so that it fit perfectly into it, and then fasten a new layer of surprises created from a different point of view to it. And we had to do it without erasing the usual world. Even despite the fact that last time we rackled our heads to collect all this together! (Laughs.) Of course, from the point of view of developers, to invent ideas for creating new surprises is much more interesting, but it was a difficult development process.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom will be released on May 12 at Nintendo Switch, the preliminary download has already begun. On May 11, Nintendo will conduct a special live broadcast Treehouse Live, preceding the start of the game.