Topic: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

It's a good way of killing 2 birds with one stone. 1 is that they often struggle to find a reason for Zelda to have a major role in the story. 2 is that some people wanted a female Link. It obviously makes sense to use Zelda rather than changing the sex of established characters.

Hot take: BotW had the best story in the series, regardless of how one feels about that story primarily taking place in the past.

Zelda stories are usually awful. Twilight Princess' "story" was a long string of McGuffin hunts strung together with vague high fantasy concepts, for example. BotW's narrative focused more on the internal struggles of Princess Zelda with her destiny, which I found very interesting. The way story cutscenes are used as a reward for exploration and puzzling together the location of a photo was also inspired and forced me to integrate my mental picture of Hyrule gradually as I explored the land. It also jelled perfectly with the design of an open world game where you have the freedom to go anywhere. There's no getting distracted from the main quest in that game, as almost everything makes you more powerful in some way, which contributes to your primary goal of annihilating Ganon. It's a game almost completely free of ludonarrative dissonance.

It needed fishing, though. The lack of proper fishing is inexcusable.

i'm by no means obsessed. just, as a girl, who is absolutely in love with this series, the prospect of being able to play as the female titular character makes me so excited! it's not something guys often think about, because most video game protagonists are male by default (yes i know not always, but most). if you always played as a girl, and now you had a chance to play as a guy in your favorite series, wouldn't you be excited? i know i am! i love link and i don't want to replace him. but it'd be nice to shake things up.

i don't want zelda playable just because she's a girl though. i want it to make sense with the plot, i want the plot to be just as good as it always is and i want her to be unique. also @Ralizah totally agree on the fishing.

I don't think that's actually true any more. If you look through the list of all games mentioned in the E3 direct, and separate them into 3 categories. 1) Exclusively male protag 2) Exclusively female protag, 3) Character choice/party of multiple characters.
I think you'll find that the 3rd category is easily the largest.

Ready for release, holiday 2021. Calling it now.

@Arbor Maybe that's just Nintendo with Mario and Link, but it's mostly 50/50 these days. And no, I wouldn't want to play as Larry Croft or male Samus

Erm, just watched it again and just saw the upside down person, just a thought, don't know if anyone else has said it but.. Lorule???

Therefore a parallel world map???

But please bring back Dungeons

I can't wait till this thread devolves to talking about grass the way it did for the first game.

There's no grass underground tho. I hope you will be able to cut the stalagmites!

the good ol' days of year long droughts. ahhhh

Oh boy, don't remind me...

Just wait, they’ll do a Square Enix, delay the game 5 years in a row, and then sell it as a different title.

This is a high fantasy game. There can be grass anywhere.

@Octane the difference is, though, you're not playing as some made-up female version of link, like your suggested "larry croft". zelda is the titular character of the series. she's always been the distressed maiden, until botw, when she had a more central story focus. i think now is the right time to let her shine and have her own game.

i really hope, that since they will be re-using many assets (presumably), we will see this game in 2021. i think next year is a huge stretch, but i hope it doesn't bleed into 2022. and if it does, i hope we get quality ports in the meantime to tide us over.

@Arbor 2020 is possible I think. Late 2020 means they've had three years to work on this; and they're reusing the engine, the world, character models, etc. If Kojima can build Death Stranding from scratch in three years, I'm certain Nintendo can finish BOTW 2 in the same amount of time

Yeah honestly I think this is a holiday 2020 game. Assuming they're also using the same map as a base for whatever alterations they're gonna do, the most time-consuming part of development is pretty much done for them already, being the engine itself and the overall map. But we'll see. I just don't see them announcing it with in-game footage if it was another 2 years off.

I think I would go supernova.

No cutting grass for rupees. 7/10

Having the ability to choose the gender of Link is not taking anything away, only adding. The story of botw could have worked just as well with a female Link. And in the case of games, they are dynamic media. They are not static like movies where you have to cast an actor and stick with the choice.

I can only speak for me and my family, but if my girls choose between two games they will take the one with a girl. Customization is even better.

...but there’s literally no point in having “female link” when the titular character of the series is female???? let her live