Echoes of Wisdom ~ Night and Weather?

With Echoes of Wisdom Nintendo wants to break the conventions of traditional top-down Zelda games. What else they are going to do, other than letting you play as Zelda and place beds all over Hyrule, we don't know yet. But one thing the top-down games never have done, unlike their big 3D counterparts, is dynamic daytime and weather.

A Link to the Past starts in the middle of the night and during rain, but once you've reached the Sanctuary it has become a sunny day and it will stay that way. It will rain on the eastern top of Mount Crenel in The Minish Cap, but nowhere else in the game. So, changes in daytime and weather were either scripted or region-based.

In the announcement trailer we can see how the game also starts in the middle of the night, but there is no reason to believe that time will progress on its own. It will be a waste if they have made this nighttime version of Hyrule only for one sequence, though. And the game might use a similar system to Skyward Sword, where you can change between day and night by resting in a bed.

If you look closely at the above trailer, during the part where Zelda builds a staircase out of beds to enter Gerudo Town, you can briefly see how a "Rest" interaction pops up, meaning that Zelda can in the very least lie down in beds. But maybe this has the same functionality as in Skyward Sword, where another good comparison would be Minecraft, because in Echoes of Wisdom you can place your beds everywhere, so it wouldn't be as limited as in the Wii game.

Changing the time of day might even be faster than in the early 3D Zelda games. You don't have to play a special song – you place a bed, sleep in it, done. Well, the fires in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom work similarly, but here you don't have the extra step of lighting the fire up.

As for weather, we have seen it rain in some tropical area, but this really might be just tied to that area. Maybe it's the Faron Woods and as a joke it always rains there, because that's your usual experience for that area in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. Or maybe it can rain in certain areas, but it will do so randomly.

Once Nintendo releases more footage, this may get cleared up. Like, if they were to show an already familiar spot during the night, this would be a big indicator for being able to switch between day and night.