At Nintendo's E3 presentation today, game director Eiji Aonuma showed a brief trailer for a new game in the Legend of Zelda series for the Wii U. The game will feature an open-world design rather than the linear progression of previous games.
In the trailer, Link is on horseback in the middle of a large field, with tall blades of grass waving in the wind. Aonuma explains that you can even reach the mountains in the distance if you walk far enough. The open-world design hearkens back to the original Legend of Zelda, which allowed you to explore Hyrule as you pleased. More recent games in the series featured a series of small areas that needed to be visited in a certain order.
"As soon as those boundaries are removed, it means you can enter any area from any direction," said Aonuma. "So the puzzle solving in this game begins the moment the player starts to think about where they want to go, how they will get there, and what they will do when they arrive."
Previous Zelda games such as Wind Waker tried to create the feeling of free exploration, but were in fact made up of a number of small areas. The new Wii U title will be the first 3D Zelda game to be truly open-world. The game appears to be breaking from other conventions as well. The trailer shows a redesigned Link in a light blue tunic, rather than his traditional green clothing.
The environment for the upcoming Zelda game is bright and colorful, featuring rolling hills covered in green grass and dotted with large boulders. Tall trees off to one side mark the edge of a forest, and a mountain range rises above the horizon. However, the tranquility of the scene is soon disrupted when a large enemy approaches and starts setting the field ablaze.
"As you can see, and as you know from the Zelda series, the world in these games can be quite peaceful," said Aonuma. "However, it is a Zelda game after all, so strong enemies will certainly appear, even in this setting. Powerful enemies appearing in such a peaceful world is one of the defining features of the Zelda series."
The new Zelda title is as yet unnamed, but it is slated for a 2015 release date. The game will be exclusive to Nintendo's Wii U.
