Friday, March 31, 2023

Tears of the Kingdom – Breath of the Wild Connectivity?

Link on a horse on the field near Fort Hateno

This is just speculation at this point, but since Tears of the Kingdom will take place in the same game world as Breath of the Wild, some people might be wondering whether some of your achievements from the previous title will carry over or not...

Someone even suggested to me that Hestu's Gift should stay with you. To be fair, he is in the middle of collecting the last Korok Seeds and was probably looking for a better motivation, but his suggestion is missing the whole point of the golden poop in the first place. The only reward from Breath of the Wild that I could see to making it into Tears of the Kingdom is the Hero of the Wild set... But that's still a bit much and Tears of the Kingdom will most likely offer a similar reward to be earned.

Other suggestions usually revolve around Link's house or Tarrey Town, but this raises a variety of problems. So, what would happen if you don't have the house and Tarrey Town quests completed in Breath of the Wild? Will you still be able to do them in Tears of the Kingdom, then? Or are you locked out of any further progression? The latter would be quite problematic, of course, and the easiest solution would be if Tears of the Kingdom simply started off where Tarrey Town could potentially end up in Breath of the Wild, whether the player has done it before or not.

Your house raises additional concerns. If your progress carries over, then players will expect to still find their weapons that they have left on the walls, but these might be weapons that aren't even supposed to show up in the new game, like anything made out of Sheikah technology. This could be a fun little "cheat", sure, but it really would be a one-time deal and not very satisfying in the end. I personally even believe that Link's house will get destroyed in the early game somehow to just be done with it, but this will eventually lead to new house building quests.

In general, I'm against this idea of this sort of connectivity for multiple reasons. First of all, Tears of the Kingdom should really become its own game and stand on its own. People shouldn't feel the need to play Breath of the Wild before this, just because there might be some gimmicks connecting the two games.

I'm also biased here, because I'm one of those few people who haven't played Breath of the Wild on the Nintendo Switch, but on the Wii U. This is where my 100% savegames are parked and it's unlikely that Nintendo will enable any sort of connectivity between the two consoles that at this point and I won't have the time to complete the game on the Nintendo Switch once more before Tears of the Kingdom comes out. That's only six weeks from now on!

Even with the Switch version of Breath of the Wild such a connectivity wouldn't be trivial. You have multiple saved games in two different modes, which are basically just "snapshots". You basically would have to select one of these save files and continue from there, but any additional progress you might make in Breath of the Wild will then be lost..

If there's anything of the sorts, it will most likely be very simple, similar to Age of Calamity. There they have checked if Breath of the Wild has a save file and then rewarded you with the Training Sword. Maybe you can find the Old Shirt and the Well-Worn Trousers on the Great Plateau or something like that... But I doubt that it will be anything substantial.

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