Tears of the Kingdom – Towers, Shrines, and Vortexes?

We knew since the first teaser trailer in 2019 that the sequel to Breath of the Wild is going to re-use the same Hyrule and that the Sheikah technology structures will have disappeared. The old towers are gone, there are no visible shrines, and the Divine Beasts have disappeared, which is all still true for the latest trailer. And this makes sense, of course, because you wouldn't want to do the same things again in the sequel.

There are a couple of new structures in the sequel, however, where most of them could already be spotted briefly in the previous trailer (so many trailers!), but they are featured much more prominently now. The towers have these beams of light around them, which adds a high amount of visibility to them in the dark. They have red glowing spots on them, but these can also turn blue, which feels very similar to the Sheikah Towers from the previous game.

But they look different, they are in different locations, and they may have an entirely different purpose. It would still be boring to simply do the same thing in different locations, where these might be access points to the sky. The same could also be true for the vortexes of green magic that we keep seeing all over Hyrule. There is one in Hateno for example:

They look like the vortex from the hand that kept Mummydorf down in the original trailer and this is all certainly related. But what are their purpose? They might work like the red tornadoes in The Minish Cap, which shoot you up. Another idea is that they will bring you down into the underworld, but you could just have a cave entrance for that...

They could potentially also just be teleportation points. With the Sheikah Shrines and Towers gone, you need some sort of replacement for this level of convenience. We are talking about over 150 warp points here, which will be missing in the sequel.

Then there are these huge glowing "paintings" on the ground, where we can even see Link riding over one in the newest trailer. We have no clue what these are for, but it certainly looks impressive in the dark. It's likely some sort of puzzle, where you have to make out constellations from above. It would be kind of the inverse of stargazing, so to speak.

Overall it feels like the sky islands will essentially become what the Sheikah Shrines were in Breath of the Wild. So, they will be about testing Link and they will serve as mini-dungeons, some of them maybe even as actual dungeons, because there are some really huge islands to be seen.

The main difference is that this is entirely seamless, so you don't go into a shrine, have a loading screen, and then be in some completely disconnected underground facility. They want the entire game to feel like Hyrule Castle in Breath of the Wild, where one moment you are on Hyrule Field and the next you enter a dungeon. And this would make the game even more impressive.