Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity Announced

Already game of the year! This looks absolutely amazing and completely came out of nowhere, but this only adds to the excitement. With the 35th Anniversary of Zelda next year, I didn't really have anything on the radar for this year, but it's certainly nice that we're still getting such a big title for Zelda fans in 2020.

It almost looked like 2020 is going to be a blank year for Zelda, except for the Cadence of Hyrule DLC stuff. But Hyrule Warriors to the rescue! The timing couldn't have been any more perfect and this will be a great game to pass the time until the sequel to Breath of the Wild gets released.

As you may know, I'm a huge fan of both Hyrule Warriors and Breath of the Wild, where I've put about 800 hours of play time into each of these titles. So, getting the love child of these two games is a huge deal. It also makes so much sense...

When discussing a potential Hyrule Warriors 2 in the past, it was always clear that the focus will be on Breath of the Wild, mainly with making the Champions playable and adding locations from that game. Even before Breath of the Wild was released, the Champions felt like playable characters from a new Hyrule Warriors game.

The big twist here is that the new Hyrule Warriors game will exclusively focus on Breath of the Wild and its characters, but this also makes so much sense in many ways. First of all, we already have Hyrule Warriors in its Definitive Edition on the Nintendo Switch with 29 fighters and tons of content, where this doesn't become obsolete with a sequel right now. Instead we will have one Hyrule Warriors game for classic Zelda and one for Breath of the Wild.

And with that they don't have to come up with some crazy story of how everything came together this time. They will instead focus on actual events in the Zelda timeline, which previously have been only explored via flashbacks and where fans have been begging to learn more about them. Age of Calamity might even become "canon" in the timeline and act as a companion piece to Breath of the Wild.

So, this is a really good idea and there is so much stuff that they can do with Breath of the Wild alone, where we'll be looking at potential fighters in a separate post right after this one! But the world of Breath of the Wild is so huge, there's more than enough battlefields for one entire Warriors here alone.

Imagine a battle at the Akkala Citadel or the decisive battle at Fort Hateno. We might be able to finally experience all of these events in great detail and even take action there. We might be able to see Hyrule Castle Town before it was destroyed. There is so much potential here, it almost feels like Breath of the Wild was made with a new Hyrule Warriors game in the mind.

Plus, it really looks beautiful, where Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity is using the same graphics as Breath of the Wild. While the character design was superb, the first Hyrule Warriors didn't always look that nice otherwise, especially with the environments. But Age of Calamity looks like a lot more on par with the quality of the main game.

Now, all this needs is a nice Christmas bundle with a slick Breath of the Wild themed Nintendo Switch, which is what should have happened three years ago already. Or otherwise I'm going to be one unhappy Zelda fan, when I really have to buy a regular Switch after all this time to play this... Please, Nintendo, use this opportunity and give us a shiny bundle!