Nintendo's Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has been a huge success for the company and the "open air" design that they used for the game could end up becoming the new standard for the Legend of Zelda series.
According to Polygon, executive producer Eiji Aonuma explained to Famitsu that due to the strong positive feedback and a lot of the critical acclaim (and commercial success) they may use Breath of the Wild's template for future games. Aonuma states...
I think that, in the future, open air games will be the standard for Zelda.
That's a pretty cool philosophy to take considering that Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is such a massive game with tons of depth and playability. There's a lot to do and a lot of places to go and a lot of things to experiment with in the game.
However, one of the things that makes the game stand out is the fact that it's not a derivative, recycled experience nor is it an annual outing. The fact that this game arrived after The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, with a clear six year gap between the 2011 outing, shows that Nintendo likely won't be adopting a more condensed development schedule for the mainline entries in the Legend of Zelda series.
The one thing they really shouldn't do is see the success of an open-world game and then attempt to replicate Ubisoft with what they do with their games, such as Far Cry or Assassin's Creed, where they've released so many games in such a short period of time that they over-saturated the genre and gave gamers genre fatigue.
Nintendo hasn't been doing that with their brands, so I doubt they would start now. One of the things they value most is the integrity of their brands, so it's unlikely they might try to adopt biannual releases for something as highly coveted as The Legend of Zelda.
However, if their next game is just as big, if not bigger, than Breath of the Wild, then that's going to be absolutely awesome, especially if they take their time on it and do it right by whatever system they plan on launching the game on.
One of the things a lot of reviewers and gamers love about Breath of the Wild is the fact that the game lets you do a lot to discover all sorts of crazy secrets and items sprinkled about the game world. The ability to climb any object also helped with Breath of the Wild's appeal, given that it's not often in open-world games that you can literally climb anything.
Of course, given how much ground they covered in the newest game and how in-depth it is as far as gameplay is concerned, I do have to question exactly what they could possibly do with the next entry in the series. I almost feel like they nearly covered everything as much as they could in Breath of the Wild and I'm at a complete loss as to how they could even follow-up such a masterpiece. I guess we'll find out when they take the open-air concept to the next level with their newest Legend of Zelda title, whenever that may be.
