Im going to point out the obvious in all the current chatter, we have yet to say a running gameplay demonstration of Tears of the Kingdom. I have never seen any game less than four months away now be so secretive with the footage shown of it. Especially for a direct sequel. So I still firmly believe that TotK has something to do with a Switch 2 presentation that will be before the game launches
There's that, but more importantly, what really strikes me as odd regarding TotK is the abnormally prolonged development cycle of that game.
If it releases as scheduled on May 12th, 2022, it will have been a 6 years and 2 months wait for that game to release since BotW.
For the record, the longest time gap we've ever had between two mainline Zelda games on home consoles so far was between Skyward Sword and BotW, which was about 5 years and 3 months, and one of the reasons we had to wait for so long in the first place was because the game had been delayed in order to launch with the Switch, as Aonuma himself stated in an interview.
Furthermore, since Nintendo has now dropped support for the 3DS, all development resources are now exclusively allocated to Switch development, so they don't even have the excuse of also having to develop Zelda games for another platform.
And before anyone says "But there's been COVID and it's Nintendo's most ambitious game ever!", please let me familiarize you with what I believe to be the most relevant point of comparison here: Xenoblade Chronicles 3.
XC3 is a game that features a humongous open world, which, while heavily inspired by previous entries in the series, was nonetheless built entirely from the ground up in a significantly different art style from the other games, with an entire new cast of characters, as well as a brand new story full of inspiration and complex developments.
This game has obviously seen a lot of care and effort be put into every aspect of its development, whether it be the game design, the UI, the general art direction, the animations and voice acting, the soundtrack, as well as of course the visuals, with the implementation of some pretty advanced rendering techniques in an effort to improve the image quality over its predecessor.
On the other hand, from what we've been shown so far in TotK's trailers, that game seems to be pretty much nothing more than BotW with updated graphics as well as some extra verticality and new gameplay mechanics thrown in for good measure. Of course there's probably more to it than what we've seen so far (I'm fairly convinced that there will be dungeons this time around, for instance), but still, it's plain for anyone to see that the game's base world map is exactly the same as in BotW and that the art style hasn't changed in the slightest bit since the predecessor, with which it also shares some very similar if not identical assets.
Heck, Aonuma himself stated in an interview that the game was originally intended to release as DLC for BotW, and that they decided to make it standalone as the project grew more ambitious. And in all fairness, if it weren't for the upgraded visuals, that's exactly what TotK's trailers would look like to me: BotW DLC.
I would actually argue that there seem to be less differences between BotW and TotK than there were between Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask, and the latter games released at an interval of about 18 months.
Now don't get me wrong: I'm not trying to say that as a game, TotK will be inferior to XC3. We won't be able to tell that until it releases. But at least as a project, I've got no reason to believe XC3 was any less ambitious than TotK is. I'm actually rather inclined to believe the contrary.
And yet, Monolith soft (who by the way is almost certainly heavily involved in TotK's development, making the comparison all the more relevant) still managed to complete their game on time for it to release merely 4 years and 8 months after its predecessor, even in spite of the pandemic.
I might add that the game didn't feel at all like it had been rushed, and released in a highly polished state, with good optimization and very few bugs and glitches.
Now if Monolith could achieve this when it comes to their own game, how on earth would Nintendo need more than 6 years to develop a game that doesn't even seem that different from BotW?
Nintendo would have us believe that they're just being extremely ambitious with that project and are working harder than ever to deliver us the best possible experience, but to me that just sounds like some generic PR talk and I'm not buying at all into that narrative.
Not only is 6 years way too long of a development period, but the fact that the very first teaser trailer for the game was shown at E3 2019 lends credence to the idea that it was originally meant to be released much earlier than in 2023 or even 2022, as it's very unusual for a game to be teased 4 or even just 3 years before it's intended release window.
I tend to believe that Nintendo's initial intent was to release the game somewhere in 2021 or maybe even late 2020, perhaps alongside the OLED model or some other mid-gen refresh that has since been canned, and that plans changed for whatever reason, with COVID perhaps being one factor (though I doubt the pandemic would account for any more than a year of delay or so).
Also, the idea that TotK has now been done for a little while is, in my opinion, strongly supported by the very unusual fact that Nintendo was able to announce a hard release date for the game 8 months ahead of time: I don't think they would have taken the risk to do so if back in September development wasn't already complete, or at least extremely close to completion, considering how any unexpected occurrence in the development process would result in a delay that might compromise the announced release date.
Personally, I'm under the impression that TotK has been "golden" for probably at least a full year by now if not longer, which raises the following question: what would possess Nintendo to sit on such a game for such a long period of time? Surely such a decision must be warranted by some pretty serious motive. It's not like Nintendo had an incredible lineup of games on offer for the last holiday season, and couldn't have advantageously slotted TotK in there. So why would they rather wait?
Obviously the reason must be somehow marketing related. What it is exactly is anyone's guess, but personally, I feel like TotK's weird timing can't be better explained than by Nintendo's intention to use that game in order to promote new hardware.
If that's the case, then it's only natural to assume said new hardware will release either alongside the game or a few weeks before, as that would seemingly make the most sense.
But even if that weren't the case, I would still assume that the game's timing is somehow related to the will of promoting new hardware, and that the new device must be somewhere right around the corner.
In any case, I guess the moment of truth will be the next Direct, unless we get information from somewhere else by then.
Ireland
