In less than three months we will be playing Tears of the Kingdom and we still haven't seen a single second of live gameplay. We haven't even gotten a screenshot with the game's HUD visible. It's all just been snippets from the trailer montages so far, where the one from the last Nintendo Direct probably created more questions than it answered. We don't really know much about the story, other than that Ganondorf is back, where we are left to speculate by Nintendo.
This certainly has raised some concern among the Zelda community, where for now this just looks like a glorified expansion for Breath of the Wild and Nintendo hasn't given us anything substantial. But is it really because they don't have anything substantial to show or because they don't want to?
Let's be fair, all Nintendo needs to give in order to market this game are the following three lines of information:
- This is the sequel to Breath of the Wild.
- It is called "Tears of the Kingdom".
- It will launch on May 12th, 2023.
That's all it needs. Breath of the Wild was so massively successful that its sequel will sell plenty on reputation alone. The players will give it the benefit of the doubt and the big fans are going to buy and play it anyway. But Breath of the Wild is still selling as we speak, where it recently has broken the 30 million mark, numbers that past Zelda titles couldn't even dream of. It's an evergreen and if the sequel is any good, it will also do extraordinarily well. It may not sell as much as Breath of the Wild has, given the nature of a sequel coming out at the end of a console's life span, but it will also likely leave the rest of the series behind.
Nintendo can use this to their advantage to limit their marketing for this game to a need-to-know basis, so that the players will discover most of it themselves when they finally play the game, where all the puzzle pieces from the trailers are then coming together. Instead of Nintendo explaining it to us in a Nintendo Direct, we will experience it first hand for ourselves. And the rest will be achieved by word of mouth. "Did you see that?"
It is one thing when Nintendo just simply shows us something in advance, it is another to discover it for yourself. Imagine the impact of finding your first big dungeon, something that you may not even expect this game to have at this point.
A great sense of discovery is what made Breath of the Wild so special and if you think about it, Nintendo has mostly stuck to the Great Plateau when showcasing the game prior to its launch and left everything else for the players to discover. We didn't really know anything about the Champions or what the Divine Beasts were, before we played the game, for example, we only got glimpses of them in the final trailer. We hadn't even seen Zelda's face before that trailer!
Speaking of, I'm sure Nintendo will release one last trailer for Tears of the Kingdom to generate hype, something that will be as epic as that infamous Nintendo Switch Presentation Trailer, which certainly took part in the console's early success. This may even be where they show us some of the things that the fans desperately want to see, like larger dungeons or weapon crafting.
But hype is a double edged sword and you have to use it responsibly to not create false expectations. I still remember how the last trailer for Breath of the Wild created all these possibilities in my head, where I assumed that the Champions or their descendants could become playable, like the partners in The Wind Waker, which didn't happen until three years later with Age of Calamity. And I already have to be careful with this again...
It could be that Tears of the Kingdom has fantastic dungeons this time. It could be that you will be able to play as Zelda in some form. It could be that the patented "morph through ceiling" ability is an absolute game changer, which will alter your perception of every three dimensional space... But as long as Nintendo hasn't shown us any of these things in action, we shouldn't expect them to happen.
Still, one might hope that Nintendo is going into this game with the utmost confidence that they have something truly special once more, which will have been worth the wait and all the secrecy.
No comments:
Post a Comment