Tears Of The Kingdom's Take On Hyrule Was Inspired By Wii Sports Resort

thegamer.com:

If you think the setting for Tears of the Kingdom looks a lot like the Zelda game you have been playing for the last six years, you'd be right. The Breath of the Wild sequel takes place in the same Hyrule as the previous game, but that doesn't mean it's going to be identical. New and unfamiliar layers have been added to the Hyrule we know and love, a concept that was apparently inspired by Wii Sports Resort.

Tears of the Kingdom's technical director Takuhiro Dohta revealed the decision to build on an already-existing Hyrule rather than send Link somewhere new came from an unlikely place during a new Nintendo interview (thanks, IGN). “When I was working on the programming for Wuhu Island during Wii Sports Resort's development, I remembered [Shigeru] Miyamoto-san saying that he wanted to 'turn the actual stages of games into characters',” Dohta recalls.

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“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... I'd been wanting to try this idea with other titles, and I supposed this game would leverage that kind of approach.” Much like Wii Sports Resort was effectively just the hugely successful Wii Sports with new layers, Tears of the Kingdom will be the same thing to Breath of the Wild.

Although the setting is naturally familiar, I can't imagine many people have seen Tears of the Kingdom gameplay and rolled their eyes, upset that it looks too much like Breath of the Wild. For starters, the game on which Tears of the Kingdom has been built is regarded as one of the greatest ever. It's also evident the layers Dohta is referencing will achieve the goal of making the sequel feel