(Disclaimer: I have successfully blocked all info since the final trailer, well mostly, besides seeing glimpses of photos of new information and won't be discussing anything beyond the last trailer and the Art book).
In a game....... That makes it abundantly clear...... The gameplay will be left up to the players imagination...... And what they can do in that world....
We are absolutely getting underwater exploration! I have remained silent on this topic for far too long. So for you Nay Sayers, Ho Humers and "Haven't seen it, so it doesn't Exist," Zelda fans out there, please lend me your ears as this post is for you! Our common sense and basic logical reasoning is all we need. As always, mine may seem questionable at best to some of you who have endured some of my previous lengthy posts, please interject with your thoughts and anything that I miss from past posts, to new possibilities and mindless hype speculation.
Keep in mind if you disagree with anything written here, The FULL POWER and capabilities of this now fully functional Station shall spell your doom! Ehh, or what ever it ends up being at least.
Let's start by looking at Mr. Aonuma and the development Team first.
We have all heard he wanted to revisit this same Hyrule for various reasons, but the truth of the matter goes back to Skyward Sword and how the developers were limited with how they were able to portray that game and fully realize it given the hardware of the Wii. So now we have TotK Sky Islands and a seemless transition between the sky and the ground makes perfect sense. But of course the Zelda Team are not going to limit themselves to only fully realizing Skyward Sword.
There is no chance in hell that they didn't want to go back to BotW with all it's success and rebuild it from the ground up with only the Switch in mind instead of having to worry about the WiiU crossover limitations of that game.
I stated this awhile ago but with all the water that covers the surface in this Hyrule it had to be killing Aonuma, who just so happens has a hobby of underwater cave diving, that they were not able expand the players freedom to include underwater exploration. It's obvious they even tried and that's how get Youtube videos showing underwater biomes that exist in BotW that were not used.
They even hired additional developers who had much more expanded resumes besides game development and with more specific backgrounds and expertise in real world applications, so they could benefit from their experience and apply it to TotK.
We can assume they would do this for WW as well knowing they had to cut additional dungeons and just the overall limitations of what exploring the Great Sea ended up being. And I wouldn't be surprised if it even goes further than that for all the past Zelda games as well.
Nintendo showed us a lot in the last trailer right? Nope, we just think we saw a lot, because we were starved for 4 years. When you haven't really eaten in four years and someone gives you a half of slice of bread, it's glorious and you are happy and satisfied. Sure we saw a snippit or two of probably mid-game and even late game scenes for a second or two, from probably the best trailer ever, but with how secretive they have been, we have to assume that they only showed us the equivalent of the Great Plateau as far as the volume of things that are going to be in this game and exactly showed us exactly and only what they wanted us to see.
The entire back of the Zoled is covered in Water zen ripples of water and the whole right controller as well. And we know these are water ripples from the Art book. But we have never seen them, heard a peep or even a hint at what they are suppose to be in any trailer.
Side note: just really looking at how the photo on the right up close looks like, there are lines in between the ripples and weird flashes of the light which remind me of some of the blue sparkles we saw surrounding some of the new Champions from the last trailer.
From the gameplay demonstration we know the Island rock chunk Link uses the recall ability on takes him up to an altitude of 500 on the z axis which is already higher than death mountain. And we now know, and this is the only reference I will use, that some underground locations are at least -500 on the z axis for a fact.
I am not a game developer, and feel free to chime in here, but I look at the world of TotK as a 3 dimensional cube to use as available space to put in assets into the world of TotK.
Since this is going be a vertical world it makes sense that we have underground areas that go very deep. But those underground areas are not going take up the entire underground area allotted to them which may be as much as 20-25% of available space. So the Devs would essentially be making the decision to just not include anything in that potential available space? We know they are capable now of using that space because of the underground -500 z axis so wouldn't it just be weird to able to travel that far underground, but still have some magical water surface barrier that doesn't allow us to go underneath the water?
I do think the Devs are going to put their own spin on underwater exploration however and I think there will be some limitations. I think rivers and streams are out. Only because I think they will be shallow enough in order for us to drive our Tanks through them.
I'm also eagerly awaiting for the first person to drive their tank to the top of Zoras Domain and plummet off of Ploymos Mountain and into East Reservoir Lake. Which begs the question will you be able retrieve your vehicle if it sinks? What happens when you drive it into the sea and it slowly disappears from underneath you? So that brings me to underwater vehicles. We are able to build flying Quad ships, Air balloons, bounce off of Flying Rito ships, Cars, rafts and horse carriages but not underwater vehicles. My imagination is not limited and tells me we can.
We have already seen possible game inspirations from the Matrix and Mission impossible in the trailer:
So why not throw in a little classic James Bond or Tomb Raider for good measure.
Plus Lara Crofts' vehicle comes complete with fans attached already.
I have always associated Horizon with BotW just because they came out at almost exactly the same time in 2017. And I don't want to say there is a competition between the two games per se, but the games seem to be developing and expanding at the same rate as far as gameplay mechanics in an open world. And we have the luxury of seeing Horizons underwater exploration already, so something tells me the Zelda Team will be on the same wavelength in their development with Zelda. Not that they are worried about what Sony is doing or copying them, just at that same point in their open world development. And knowing the Zelda Team they will be way ahead of Sony with underwater exploration and probably will not be satisfied with just underwater swimming. At the very least they will want to finally make it a memorable experience and not just an after thought in a Zelda game.
So not to ruffle any feathers as I have read almost of all of the comments regarding the ship in the Art Book and most think it is a static dungeon and probably won't be utilized to the travel the open sea, I have posted about the ship and about the map room several times in the past but I sill think we play through a Hyrule that is completely surrounded by water at some point.
The Map room is going to be very important in my opinion, and I still think it has to with turning on the water faucet near the top of the map to change the map.
The design of the Art book ship is so much different than from the Rito ones we saw in the trailer. This one has more pirate vibes to me and is using bones of ancient sea creatures as its structure. I'm kind of thinking that maybe each Race will have a ship associated with it, and we might get a Sand Ship as well as some crazy metal Lava ship for the Gorons. So if my theory is correct about there being water that completely surrounds Hyrule, then I definitely see us utilizing this ship to travel around the water as another option to rafts. Maybe it can even go underwater?
I was left to die on my own hill when I was speculating that the Gotcha Machine in the Art book would be a lot more than just an Amiibo function or some type of surprise item machine. It still maybe both that and a means to travel through bubbles of water in the air. What I have found so far in reading everyone's speculation that the truth lies somewhere in the middle between the obvious and crazy speculation.
