Earlier today Nintendo announced a slew of new game announcements and features for the Wii U via a Nintendo Direct. Among them, Zelda fans will be pleased with the announcement of Wind Waker HD and a brand new Zelda title that is in development for the Wii U.
Zelda Wii U
Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma took the spotlight for a moment to discuss the “driving theme” behind the new Zelda game that is currently in development for the Wii U. This theme revolves around Nintendo rethinking the standard conventions of Zelda. Aonuma uses examples of current conventions like completing dungeons in linear order and the fact that we play Zelda games by ourselves. It seems Nintendo would like to alter our next experience with Link to keep gameplay fresh and avoid more of the same.
Aonuma mentions that he wanted to implement such features in Skyword Sword but they weren’t able to fully realize such concepts for release. Unfortunately no new screenshots are available for Zelda Wii U, but it seems more will be revealed sometime soon.
Wind Waker HD
It makes sense that Nintendo is trying to find their ground with a new HD console, and so naturally they went back to their roots and played around a bit. Aonuma stated that they took some time to turn fragments of older Zelda games into HD, and in this discovered just how beautiful an HD remake of Wind Waker could be. Isn’t this what fans have been clamoring for? It seems that we can expect this title to release sometime during Fall 2013.
Iwata mentions that not only will the HD remake feature an upgrade in graphics, but that the game experience will be receiving a tune up. No details have been announced at this time as to what this may mean, but one feature unique to the Wii U’s gamepad is that we will now be able to play Wind Waker on the tablet controller. Iwata says we “should” be able to use Miiverse with the title as well, so I think this means we can expect some fun sharing features.
