The Legend of Zelda Will Stick to the Open World Format with Future Instalments

gamingbolt.com:

2017’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was a massive reinvention for Nintendo’s beloved action-adventure franchise, eschewing the item-based progression and dungeon-centric linear structure of its predecessors for a completely free-form open world approach that emphasized physics, emergent gameplay, and player agency above all else. Its sequel, the recently-released Tears of the Kingdom, has taken that to even greater heights, and unsurprisingly, this is a road that Nintendo intends to keep walking down for the foreseeable future.

Speaking in a recent interview with Game Informer, series producer Eiji Aonuma said that similar to Ocarina of Time – which “created a format” for pretty much all Zelda titles that came after it (until 2017, at least) – Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom have established a new open world formula focused on player freedom that the series will be sticking to with future instalments.

“With Ocarina of Time, I think it’s correct to say that it did kind of create a format for a number of titles in the franchise that came after it,” Aonuma said. “But in some ways, that was a little bit restricting for us. While we always aim to give the player freedoms of certain kinds, there were certain things that format didn’t really afford in giving people freedom. Of course, the series continued to evolve after Ocarina of Time, but I think it’s also fair to say now that we’ve arrived at Breath of the Wild and the new type of more open play and freedom that it affords. Yeah, I think it’s correct to say that it has created a new kind of format for the series to proceed from.”

Of course, games take a lot longer to make now, so if, say, in 20 years’ time Nintendo does want to reinvent