Dawn of a New Year – 2023

This is it. This is the year. For real this time. We're are getting The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom in 2023. On May 12th, to be exact, so mark your calendars. And this will with all certainty be what defines the year 2023 for Zelda fans. Six years after the release of the Nintendo Switch, we will return to the Hyrule from Breath of the Wild, explore its underground, and ascend into its skies.

The only question is what else will be there. We already know that a special edition of the Nintendo Switch OLED might be on its way, but with a new Zelda game of this caliber this is probably just the beginning. So, what else could surround the release of Tears of the Kingdom? Are we getting some kind of Collector's Edition for the game? Will there be new Zelda amiibo? Will the game get an Expansion Pass?

These are the questions that will be answered this year, but they all revolve around Tears of the Kingdom. The focus will be on the big new title and therefore you shouldn't expect anything else for the Zelda franchise at the moment. Yes, ports of The Wind Waker HD and Twilight Princess HD are always an option, but Nintendo wouldn't want to split the attention, so that's more something for the later year or a later year at this point. Same with remakes of the Oracle games, any other top-down Zelda, or a Zelda dungeon maker, and so on.

Well... technically, a dungeon maker could be a possibility, as long as this is tied to Tears of the Kingdom somehow, as an extra feature for the game, similar to the Chamber Dungeon. But a "Shrine Maker" based on Breath of the Wild would have made more sense in this department anyway, so I don't really have any expectations here, unless it's something simple yet again.

Anyway, we are getting the big new Zelda game, the twentieth installment in the series, which has been in development for over five years now. And that alone will be more than enough, where this year will most likely feel very similar to 2017, the year where Breath of the Wild came out.

But of course Zelda isn't the only great Action Adventure franchise out there, where we might get something for Metroid as well. A possibility would be a remaster of Samus Returns from the Nintendo 3DS, as a quick follow-up to the success of Metroid Dread. Since the original came out in the same year as Breath of the Wild, this would be slightly poetic. And once Tears of the Kingdom is out in the wild, Nintendo might decide to share a first teaser for Metroid Prime 4. Who knows...?

Then there is also Hollow Knight: Silksong, where Hollow Knight also came out in 2017 and video game history really could repeat itself in 2023. We don't have a release date for the sequel/prequel yet, but if it were to came out in 2023 as well, then this would become the dream year for fans of classic Action Adventures.