Tears of the Kingdom – Dungeons?

One of the burning questions everyone has about Tears of the Kingdom is, will there be dungeons? I was certain that the last trailer is going to answer this... and the answer might be a no. At least not in a traditional sense.

They might be trying something new here, where absolutely everything is connected seamlessly. Hyrule Castle was the most impressive dungeon in Breath of the Wild, not only because it offered a very different tone, but because it was fully integrated into the normal game world. You didn't need any loading screens, like you had with the shrines or Divine Beasts.

The Sheikah Shrines were really their own mysterious world. It was completely disconnected from the rest of the game world and you couldn't even tell how deep down in the earth they reside. The game had effectively two sides here, the overworld and the mini-dungeon world, both only connected via the shrine entrances.

Arguably, it looked like they also wanted to make the Divine Beasts as an integrated part of the world, where you could just jump off at any time, but there probably where some technical limitations why they couldn't make this happen. You can just jump off from the sky islands, however.

And a big part of the sky islands appear to be flying mini-dungeons, where they are probably going to replace the shrines, only in a completely seamless fashion. During the gameplay demonstration you can also spot cave entrances on the map with checkmarks on them, which may indicate that caves also will serve a similar purpose.

Some of the underground areas also appear to be huge, where they could serve as dungeons as well, but nothing that we've seen so far looks like traditional dungeons, more like gigantic caves. And most of this will probably connected seamlessly as well, where you might be entering the giant lava cave via mineshafts at Death Mountain.

Of course somewhere in there could be something that's supposed to be classic dungeons, if that's even a possibility with all your new abilities, where the biggest indicator so far has been the giant pyramid emerging from the sands of Gerudo Desert. It really depends on how much they've wanted to show us at this point, but it seemed like a lot. And the last trailer for Breath of the Wild also showed us the inside of a Divine Beast for the first time, with Vah Naboris and Vah Ruta.

In the new trailer we have the sequences where Link gets followed by Tulin and Sidon. With Tulin he goes into the storm cloud with the flying Rito ships, while he and Sidon appear to be on Zora-themed sky islands, which are dropping this goo onto Zora's Domain. Both of these could be this game's equivalent of dungeons, even if they don't look the part.

I'm personally not too worried, because I don't necessarily need those Fire and Water Temples back that they've been making again and again. I'd love to see something new and I'm more excited about potentially getting a completely seamless world in a Zelda game for the first time. There could even be "dungeons" or underground areas with many different ways to get inside them, just like Hyrule Castle. And it would be really something else to have dungeons as this giant cage, so to speak, where need to find the best way to the core, instead of doing something formulaic.

The Divine Beasts had this lame approach with the terminals, where you have to activate all of them, which wasn't much fun. I'd love for dungeons to be more like mazes this time, filled with dangers and deadly enemies, where you have to find a way to a goal. But how to get there is really up to you. This way dungeons could also have lots of optional parts, which became a lost art for Zelda games, sadly.

In the very least the theming in the underground caves will already offer more variety than the Divine Beasts and shrines did. With the sky islands it may all feel a bit similar, however.