Image Credits: Nintendo
One of Breath of the Wild’s best features is coming back in a big way. In a new preview of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, producer Eiji Aonuma shows off 10 minutes of gameplay from the eagerly anticipated (to put it lightly) sequel to 2017’s hit.
The video includes some running around and some low-level combat, but it mostly goes over new systems intended to encourage the kind of emergent gameplay that made Breath of the Wild such a joy to discover for so many people.
In the first game, you could sail high on updrafts produced by burning grass, be struck by lightning if you wore metal armor, and cook a steak by throwing meat on the ground near a volcano. Many of the game’s environmental elements were interactive, and its shrine puzzles in particular encouraged players to experiment with different combinations of abilities, items, and their properties in order to come up with creative solutions.
Happily, all of that looks to be back and then some in the new game. Breath of the Wild introduced Stasis and Magnesis, two abilities that invited players to bend physics and move stuff around in dynamic ways. In Tears of the Kingdom, we’ll be getting at least two brand new tricks like those, one called Fuse and another known as Ultra Hand.
First, some bad news. The new gameplay video confirms that Tears of the Kingdom will again give Link flimsy, destructible weapons that explode after giving enemies a few whacks. The good news is that players can create their own weapons from items in the game world — and hopefully at least a few of those combinations are more durable than last time around.
Link can use the new Fuse ability to splice together a gigantic makeshift hammer out of a branch and a boulder, or combine a long stick with a pitchfork for a really, really long pitchfork (if this is Zelda comedy, we’re here for it). Other less apparent combinations include: When you combine a monster eyeball and an arrow, you get a homing arrow that can follow your prey and shoot it out of the heavens.
Link can use a similar skill dubbed Ultra Hand to pick up heavy items and arrange them into something new. Aonuma demonstrates this in the test by building a wind-powered airboat out of some large fans that were lying around Hyrule and some logs. The same ability will apparently let players create all kinds of vehicles, including cars and flying machines.
Aside from the two new core abilities, Link won’t have to spend so much time slogging his way up mountains this time around. Aonuma demonstrated a new mobility trick that lets Link swim up through any space with a ceiling, including buildings and apparently the giant caves within the game’s many peaks. The emphasis on verticality tracks with the sky islands and otherwise very high up environments we’ve seen before in prior previews.