Age of Calamity: Different Maps?

One of the things that Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity does really well compared to Hyrule Warriors is how it combines all game modes into one by using the map of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. There you can play and replay the main story scenarios like in Legend and Free Mode, you can play side challenges like in Adventure Mode and you can fuse weapons, buy things, unlock combos and recipes like in the Bazaar.

This should create a much nicer pace, where playing main missions and side quests one after another comes with a much more natural flow than in Hyrule Warriors, where only going into the Bazaar between scenarios was convenient enough. Or has anyone really switched between Legend and Adventure Mode regularly?

Anyway, it also makes you wonder how they'll do certain things. How will potentially playable villains be handled? And how will DLC be integrated, if there's any?

 

Villain Map?

The original Hyrule Warriors lets you play as Ganondorf and other villains during the campaign, where certain scenarios simply are tied to these characters. The map in Age of Calamity, however, seems to focus a lot more on the efforts of the good guys, where the whole thing even revolves around the Central Hyrule Tower as your base of operations.

Now, let's say that you also get to play as the villains somehow during the campaign. The existence of a corrupted version of the little Guardian egg, the "bad egg" so to say, which got teased in the demo, hints at this possibility quite strongly, because it would allow Team Ganon to use the four Sheikah Slate Runes freely as well. Master Kohga, his dual-wielding commander and the mysterious Gerudo sorceress would be the main candidates here. And they could even go for the four Blights as a counterpart to the four Divine Beasts...

Well, in that case I would expect that there is a way of switching between parties on the map, e.g. by pressing X or Y. The villain map might even use icons that are colored in the "Malice Purple" and here you would only see scenarios and side quests relevant for the evil characters.

 

DLC?

It would be very surprising if this game didn't get DLC, but what would be the best way of integrating it into this new map feature? Well, one possibility would be a "Master Mode", where you play through the same map again but with altered scenarios and challenges to make them harder.

One possibility would be playing the original story without the time travel stuff. This would mean that you can't use the Sheikah Slate Runes or even play as Zelda until later, where this doesn't feel all that likely... However, since this would be like a "Hard Mode", it's still a possibility.

But they could potentially also expand the main campaign with new scenarios, new challenges and of course more playable characters. Hopefully this would lead to something that also feels more integrated than what they've first done with DLC in Hyrule Warriors, where new characters were like a standalone package without any missions.

To be fair, they already did a better job with the DLC for Hyrule Warriors: Legends, but the focus there was entirely on the Adventure Mode. Ideally, a DLC Pack would come with one or two new characters, going hand in hand with new story scenarios, challenges and side quests for these characters. It might even be that a "Villain Map" will be DLC and not part of the main game.