Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom devs says it was always the plan to bring back Hyrule from Breath of the Wild

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is a bit of an outlier for the series in that it’s not only a sequel (to Breath of the Wild), but also reuses the same Hyrule – albeit with many changes and additions. Nintendo has now spoken more about this in a recent interview.

Series director Eiji Aonuma, director Hidemaro Fujibayashi, and technical director Takuhiro Dohta confirmed in a recent interview that it was always the plan to reuse Hyrule. Fujibayashi mentioned that “there were no objections” in keeping the same setting.

The comments from Aonuma, Fujibayashi, and Dohta can be found below. 

So this title picks up after the events of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

Aonuma: Yes, this title is set in Hyrule shortly after the end of the previous game. There are many reasons why we chose this setting. After finishing development on the previous title, we wondered if we could make it possible for players to continue exploring the world after they’ve reached the game’s ending.

The Legend of Zelda series seems to be one of those franchises where the visual style and game mechanics often change drastically for each entry. Was there ever a discussion about creating a new game with a completely new world, rather than a sequel?

Aonuma: No, not really. Although the previous title, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, has its own conclusion, we started to come up with new ideas that we wanted to bring to life in this already realized version of Hyrule, so our direction in making a sequel did not change.

Fujibayashi: Just like somewhere you know inside and out, we understand where everything is in Hyrule from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and because of that, we believed it was possible to create new gameplay. For this reason, in the initial proposal, we clearly stated “the setting will not change” as an important concept. Even when I shared this with the team members here, there were no objections, and we were all aligned on that idea from that point onward.

Dohta: When I was working on the programming for Wuhu Island during Wii Sports Resort’s development, I remembered Miyamoto-san saying that he wanted to “turn the actual stages of games into characters.” What he meant by that was to create one island and use that as a base to add various kinds of gameplay in different games. The idea of having new discoveries in the same setting was striking to me. I’d been wanting to try this idea with other titles, and I supposed this game would leverage that kind of approach.

I see. So the decision to create a sequel in the same setting was deliberate.

Dohta: In contrast, we made some fairly big changes to the gameplay. In The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, if players wanted to travel from the the sky to the ground, they had to select it from the map, but in this game, you can dive from the sky directly to the ground without any interruption.

On top of that, players can also ride on flying vehicles and so on, offering even more freedom within the same setting as the previous game. If a location were completely unfamiliar to you, you’d probably be hesitant to dive down from the sky, but because it’s a world that you’ve already explored in the previous game, these transportation methods make sense.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is due out on May 12, 2023.