Fortunately, Nintendo saw The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild 2 in the same year as E3 2021. Eagle-eyed viewers could make a lot of the clues that were shown in the announcement trailer, and the latest gameplay reveal has lots of hidden secrets that we can have to decode. Plus, we heard a few things directly from Eiji Aonuma, who is the legend’s game designer and who has only added fuel to the fire. From the playable characters and the returning enemies to the release date and storyline, here is all we know and know about Breath of the Wild, the sequel that will soon follow. Further reading
Great open-world games. Great weapons in Breath of the Wild! This is the best armor in the Wild Breath.
Release date
Breath of the Wild 2 is set to release in 2022. The news was confirmed during Nintendo’s E3 2021 keynote, although we still don’t have a precise date for the announcement. To see BOTW2 dropping in 2023, it would be interesting to see this next version postponed. However, on a recent episode of the IGNs Nintendo Voice Chat podcast, the website co-founder Peer Schneider mentioned that BOTW 2 could drop in November. That’s far from confirmation. And at that point it’s the most tantalizing news we have had for the game in quite a while. I could be in contact with some people in the game afterward and there seems to be a lot of fun next year, said Schneider. And so I wouldn’t believe that big things don’t mean that there’s a sign that maybe Breath of the Wild is delayed or that they don’t have other things because people at Nintendo are very excited about 2022.
Platforms
Breath of the Wild 2 will only be available on Nintendo Switch. Nintendo isn’t interested in bringing new, high-performance first-party titles to other consoles, and we don’t expect this trend to change if Breath of the Wild 2 begins. As soon as they launched the OLED switch, rumors remain spread over the Switch Pro Console and it will be interesting to see if Breath of the Wild 2 coincides with the introduction of a Next-Gen Switch. With the latest Hyrule Warriors pushing the system to its limits, Breath of the Wild 2 can benefit from some upgraded hardware.
Trailers
Nintendo released two trailers for Breath of the Wild 2 – a brief reveal and a short game trailer announced by E3. The trailer is so interesting that it shows diverse new mechanics, among them some that could be borrowed from Skyward.
Gameplay
While there are a lot that we don’t know about BOTW2s gameplay, we were pretty sure players will be able to return to Hyrule seen in the original Breath of the Wild. Eiji Aonuma, creator of Breath of the Wild and its upcoming sequel, said that he would love to visit the world again and introduce new gameplay concepts along with a new story. He later said that Breath of the Wild 2 will indeed be a continuation of the original, so we should expect to see more of the Hyrule we’ve known and loved in the past few years. The latest E3 movie has finally confirmed that statement a lot, though there are plenty of floating islands on the sky that can be explored for a long time now. It’s unclear whether these sites will easily be accessible when on the ground, or if they’ll be set on a completely different timeline, like the emergence of young and adult Link variants in the Ocarina of Time. A thing everyone found in the reveal trailer is that this entry appears to be much darker than its predecessor. The legend of Zelda: Majoras Mask – as well as the darkest and most disturbing game in the series – confirmed it, saying it’ll be similar to the entry. The exact way that will look out is unknown; however, it was confirmed that it won’t enter Majoras Mask any more. This might have a similar aesthetic, but that doesn’t mean that any story elements from the hit Nintendo 64 will have any impact. The development team was assembling too many DLC ideas, surprisingly, the driving factor for Breath of the Wild sequel. While DLC works to add small changes to a game, it functions as an expansion of the original. Aonuma said that the team had some big changes that they wanted to implement, but they couldn’t do that using DLC. As the time went on and more ideas got noticed, it became clear that a new game was the best way to achieve these. As soon as the trailer was revealed at E3 2019, the internet exploded with news and speculation. It isn’t all reliable, but we’ve created a list of the realistic pitfalls. Nintendo hasnt commented either way about the following claims, so it’s possible that some of these great ideas make it into the final product:
The trailer shows that Link and Zelda are experimenting with some kind of underground chamber, but Zelda looks like a little different than we remember. Her hair is short into a look. Fans are speculating that she will become a playable character. Fewer hair has a tendency to curl into other objects. Moreover, it has more practical applications without dredging a dull look with no tingling animation. I am not sure how likely it is, but I can’t deny it would be great to be around Hyrule as something other than Link. That watching link and Zelda in the release trailer led some fans to the impression that this might be a co-op title. Aonuma was asked about this possibility and never gave an answer. While it’s probably not going to be the driving force of the game, we hopeful that you’ll be able to come back to a friend this time around. While the Calamity occurred, several cave paintings seem to reference a time before a cave’s collapse. Does this mean that the title could be the same as the original? Traditional dungeons might be home again. Since players are already familiar with Hyrule’s map, it seems reasonable that new locations have to be underground or indoor. A man whose job is under threat, will survive, will survive. Some have also speculating that Zant, one of the antagonists of The Legend of Zelda, might also return, but there are no hard evidence against this claim.
As for the latest E3-2021 trailer, we saw Link with new tricks, such as the ability to teleport a powerful object or a deadly new gauntlet; it confirmed that much of BOTW2 won’t stray too far from the original title. Speculation is brewing about how Link, Zelda and Ganon all fit into the image, but for now, it’s just a bunch of fan theories, regardless of how intriguing they may be. Until Nintendo gives us more precise details, but stay tuned.
Multiplayer
It’s believed that the game will include co-op, but it’s only because fans saw Link and Zelda exploring together in the reveal trailer. While there are no official exceptions, offering co-op would be a big change when compared to the original Breath of the Wild.
DLC
No DLC plans have been confirmed, but Nintendo is quite likely to offer some support post-release forms. If we had the Breath of the Wild as a baseline, we would see a lot of DLC packs released in the months following the arrival of Breath of the Wild 2s.
