Nintendo’s next major entry into The Legend of Zelda franchise is set to focus on advanced puzzle-solving between dimensions, as per other insights coming from the industry. While the company has traditionally been reserved when it comes to discussing its software for the next Switch successor, newer reports imply that the next game will, on one hand, use the new hardware’s technical overhead to snap reasonably out of the physics-based systems of the past two entries. In less-so common terms than “open-air” that was established almost ten years ago, this focus will be squarely on manipulating space and parallel realities.
According to Shpeshal Nick on the XboxEra podcast, the game will run on the same engine used by Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, albeit updated on a very significant level. The aspect holding it all together appears to be the “cross-dimensional” mechanics that have the players interacting with tears in reality appearing to do something. Examples given in the leak explain situations where an action in one dimension such as flooding a room to float a platform affects the geometry of a parallel world at the same time. Such complexity in the environment could have reasonably been too heavy for the ancient Tegra X1 processor of the original Switch.
Two realms in which you move is a core aspect to Zelda happenings ever since the Dark World of A Link to the Past and the timelines of Ocarina of Time. Now, it would go like this-Hardware permitting smooth and quick transition between the two forthright. The use of those rifts within the present loop of gameplay could be the evolution of the `creative solution’ methodology used by Nintendo in the last two games. Instead of primarily creating vehicles or weapons, the players might soon be supported by two different versions of Hyrule to solve some environmental puzzles.
While this is exciting for the community, the project is bound to be a couple of years away. Such timing fits rather well with how Nintendo usually tends to work around the development cycles of its flagship titles, which often rake in five to six years. These can all mostly be placed as speculations, but such scenarios provide a very interesting view of how the developer plans on keeping the series alive. While we await the formal unveiling of Switch 2, it is going to be a multi-layered exploration basis that Nintendo has in mind to portray the next installment of its most classic franchise.
