Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are both fantastic games - and Tears of the Kingdom really does feel (to me) like they just took Breath of the Wild, and added a few more years of dev time to it.
Where do you think Nintendo will take Zelda from here though? Can they keep with the same new formula? Should they? Will a more traditional game feel disappointing after this?
I don’t really know what I want myself. I think they should try something different though. At the same time, I can’t help but think I’d be disappointed if the next game was more similar to something like Twilight Princess. Have they boxed themselves in?
In the aftermath of TotK, the world is in a sorry state. The sky islands are falling, violent quakes closed the access to the depths, and embers of darkness (fragments of the secret stone last held by Ganondorf) have fallen to the land and created fields of distortion where the present world has been over written by a section of the past. The worst are the dungeons, where the fragments empower new boss monsters.
Link and Zelda team up together to restore Hyrule with the new gameplay gimmick being the ability to swap between them. Link as a swordsman and Zelda with time powers (some inspiration from Bioshock infinite’s Elizabeth).