The Legend of Zelda series producer Eiji Aonuma has confirmed that development has started on the next game in the long-running series.
That news comes from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: Master Works (courtesy of Source Gaming), which is a lengthy book that saw release in Japan last week that contains artwork, production notes, and a historical look at how the development team worked to create Hyrule.
It’s most likely that we won’t hear about it anytime soon, but whenever the next Zelda game is eventually revealed to the world, what will be interesting to see is whether Nintendo will choose to reuse the physics-based engine that they built for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and assets, or make something entirely from scratch.
In an interview on the Nintendo Switch News channel, Aonuma has spoken about wanting to have the chance to see the four Champions back in action again.
“Especially after the launch, the Champions have been popular, so we assumed players will be interested in them,” Aonuma explained. “We’ve presented them as new and distinct characters to the series, so I think they stand out just as much as Link and Zelda. I hope that we can use them again in the future. [laughs].”
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild director Hidemaro Fujibayashi, too, has been thinking about what they will create next. And, just as with The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask to The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time or Super Mario Galaxy 2 to Super Mario Galaxy, it sounds like the team had plenty of ideas that hadn’t made it into the final game that has spurred their interest in a potential sequel.
“I can’t say at this point if it will be in sequels or in continuations, or what form it will take, but I definitely have lots of ideas and lots of motivation right now,” Fujibayashi explained to IGN.
“I think while we were working on both the main game and the DLC, it was a process of constantly getting lots of different, new ideas as we refined the game, and finding new things we wanted to do,” he added. “Even in situations like this, talking to people and finding out that people want to pet dogs gives me a lot of motivation, a lot of ideas for things we could put into the game.”
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is now available exclusively on Nintendo Switch and Wii U worldwide.
