Our Next 3D Zelda Sounds Too Obvious

Another 3D installment of The Legend of Zelda is inevitable, but the first trickle of information about its premise and gameplay has supposedly leaked. I'm among those skeptical of the new Zelda leak, but not necessarily because I believe they are untrue. I don't doubt that the leaker had a conversation with someone regarding their knowledge of the project. I just think the details are too obvious, making the leaks either practically irrelevant or too broad to have much meaning.

The leak makes a handful of claims about the setting, engine, and central gameplay gimmick of the next mainline Zelda title: it will be in the same timeline branch as Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, iterate on those games' engine, and puzzle solving most prominently revolves around manipulating parallel realities. These points could very well be information from someone with first-hand knowledge of Nintendo's intentions, but they're also very obvious guesses about what a future Zelda game might look like.

Nintendo Is Incentivized To Make A New Zelda Game Connected To BOTW & TOTK

The Zelda franchise went decades without an official, public timeline. It was thought that Nintendo had a loose chronological order for the games internally, but it wasn't until Hyrule Historia was published in 2011, shortly after Skyward Sword came out, that an official timeline was canonized. The timeline, which splits into three branches based on possible endings to Ocarina of Time, is notoriously convoluted and often effectively meaningless for tying any games together that aren't direct continuations of another.

Despite this reputation, Nintendo put BOTW and TOTK on yet another timeline branch, separated from every preceding game with no official connection. This makes the timeline still more complicated, but does smooth out some issues with conflicting events, like Rauru being the first king of Hyrule despite Zonai never appearing in Skyward Sword's era, and two separate conflicts known as the Imprisoning War.

But the reason the leak claiming a new Zelda game will be in this timeline is inconsequential is because this is the most obvious place to put a new story. Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are the two best-selling games in the whole franchise. Even a tenuous connection to them guarantees interest in this new game. While an official timeline was once of little importance to Nintendo, it would seem the company now at least considers such matters, possibly because it's important to many fans.

From a writing perspective, the separate timeline is also simply easier to work with. There is an origin story for the kingdom of Hyrule, then a little more than a century's worth of canon events untold millennia later (the Second Great Calamity and the "current day" events of BOTW and TOTK). If Nintendo is indeed interested in curating a timeline going forward, it makes sense to choose the solo branch, where there are only two games to reconcile with.

Why Wouldn't Nintendo Use The BOTW & TOTK Engine?

For similar reasons, the leak's claim that the Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom engine will be reused and enhanced for the next 3D Zelda game feels like a very safe bet. BOTW revolutionized the Zelda series by taking it into a truly open world, but perhaps more importantly on the technical side, it introduced a sophisticated physics sandbox. This was really put through its paces by TOTK, where individual items could be fused together to make modular constructions.

These two newest 3D Zelda games are astounding technological feats, and these innovations played no small part in the immense success both games enjoyed. Especially since the Switch 2 architecture and functionality is so similar to its predecessor, it just doesn't make sense for Nintendo to abandon that engine and potentially alienate newer fans by deconstructing the series again so soon.

The tech underneath Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom still has a lot of untapped potential, and with the newfound headroom afforded to the Nintendo devs by the power of the Switch 2, there likely wasn't much stock put into the idea of abandoning the tools produced over the last decade plus. This is another aspect of the leak that sounds like a big deal, but is really just the logical choice.

A Lot Of Zelda Games Involve Parallel Realities

I will concede that the part of the leak claiming the new 3D Zelda will feature reality jumping is its most compelling aspect. The examples given – hitting a switch in one reality to open a door in another, filling some apparatus with water to make a parallel object float – sound specific enough to be legitimate proof-of-concept ideas.

But the idea of manipulating parallel worlds is a common prediction for upcoming Zelda games, mainly because the series has a history of similar concepts. A Link to the Past has the Dark World, Ocarina of Time features epoch-specific dungeons and puzzles, Twilight Princess revolves around the Twilight Realm, Echoes of Wisdom's Rifts lead to Null's void. These aren't explicitly the same thing as what the leak claims, but the concept of parallel realities is not at all foreign to the series.

There's even a lot of reality warping in Tears of the Kingdom – not only in Princess Zelda's time travel, but in the powers Link wields. Ascend lets Link phase through mountains, and Rewind lets him send items back through time. Fuse defies any rational explanation if you think about it for even a little bit, and Autobuild can reconstitute Zonaite into hundreds of different materials.

If we take the previous two obvious guesses – that the next 3D Zelda will be in the same timeline and continue using the same engine – then it stands to reason that Link's abilities would continue to alter reality even further. Despite The Legend of Zelda's long history as a blockbuster gaming franchise, Nintendo is currently on a run of unprecedented success with the two most recent 3D entries, and all the leak really says is that the company will try to iterate on that success.