Eiji Aonuma Reveals Why Tears Of The Kingdom Remains In Hyrule

gameranx.com:

The countdown continues to go down for The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom. As many fans have noted in meme form online, there are only three days left until its launch, and many are getting more eager with each new day as they want to play this title as soon as possible. But while there’s plenty of hype surrounding the game, there are still some questions about it. For example, when Nintendo revealed that it would be a direct sequel to the Switch’s launch title and still have you in Hyrule, gamers wondered why they would stay in the place where we had already explored deeply.

In a special interview on Nintendo’s website, Eiji Aonuma and others in the Tears of the Kingdom development team discussed various aspects of the title. One was the setting and how it directly follows up the previous game. Aonuma noted that this was always the plan because he always had ideas for it:

“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. 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.”

Takuhiro Dohta, the game’s technical director, noted that while the setting is the same, it’s the gameplay that has evolved to make the world even more expansive:

“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