The latest Zelda Tears of the Kingdom trailer doesn't give too much away but one old mechanic has seemingly returned.
After 42 seconds of relative silence, of peaceful camera work, panning and tilting around a network of sacred wall carvings, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom announced itself to the world. In a flash, the latest trailer for the much-anticipated Breath of the Wild sequel – now with a new confirmed name – showed Link heaving open two massive doors of crumbling stone, before pegging it towards a sun-soaked ledge, beyond which floating islands lined with golden trees stretched off into the distance. Without pause, the plucky protagonist thrust himself overboard with a form-perfect swan dive, before we were shown snippets of some of the stuff we'll get up to in the new Zelda game.
This is, in essence, Breath of the Wild 2 in all but name – due on May 12, 2023 for the Nintendo Switch, as revealed during September's Nintendo Direct – with what looks like two separate plains to explore: one in the sky, and another thousands of meters below. Shouldering five years' worth of hype since Zelda's last outing, three since this game's first tease at E3 2019, and I'm excited to see how Nintendo goes even bigger than Breath of the Wild here. With hang gliding and skydiving, floating rock platforming and the first proper sense of scale between the lower and higher reaches of this game world, there's definitely plenty to shout about from the latest trailer. But, much to my dismay, one of my biggest bugbears from the previous game looks unchanged.
Let's cut to the chase: climbing in Breath of the Wild is pants. There's just no two ways about it. An arbitrary stamina bar – a feature first introduced to action RPGs in the mid-1990s – governs how far you can go in any direction, before, once the bar is emptied, you lose your grip and plummet to the next flat surface/your untimely death in an instant. In a game that's so forward-thinking in so many ways, one that puts exploration so front and center in both its narrative and moment-to-moment discovery, this throwback to such an archaic, awkwardly-executed mechanic, for me, really puts a damper on the free-wheeling nature of Breath of the Wild as a whole.
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