Tuesday, June 10, 2014

The Next Legend of Zelda game reveled at E3

After two successful Zelda projects on Wii U and 3DS, Nintendo unveiled its first details and visual style for the next console installment of The Legend of Zelda. It is scheduled for release in 2015.

Nintendo Producer Eiji Aonuma began his portion of the presentation by revisiting a now-familiar topic: How the development team is "rethinking the conventions of Zelda." Aonuma explored this theme previously in Wind Waker HD and A Link Between Worlds, but this time he focused his thoughts this time around Zelda's world.

Aonuma admits Nintendo captured a vast open world in the original NES Zelda game, and the concept slightly changed after the series shifted to 3D polygon graphics. Hardware limitations made it difficult to create one single large landmass for the player to explore; so separate zones were stitched together to make the world seem bigger. A linear path was established to take players on a continuous journey.

Aonuma expressed that he wants to take the series back to those roots of a continuous open world, one where players can visit areas out of order. "That's a convention we should keep," he enthusiastically said.

Visually, the new look for The Legend of Zelda is stunning and full of rich details. In many ways, it looks like a marked improvement on Zelda: Skyward Sword's painterly art style. You can see individual moving blades of grass, mountains and home-like structures off in the distant.

In the brief demo, a cloaked Link sits on horseback until a tentacle monster appears on the horizon. His horse races off with the monster in pursuit, as a few local herders and animals run for cover. The monster pursues Link across a bridge, breaks a portion of the wooden structure ahead of the hero, and moves in to strike. Link rips off his cloak and reveals his outfit, a blue and yellow tunic, and a trusty bow and arrow. He fires two explosive-tipped arrows to stun the beast and then pulls out a special arrow that transforms before the trailer cuts fades to white.



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