Zelda U's Map

Any questions? The "?" area probably is Snow Peak

It's GTAV all over again!

Wouldn't surprise me. Except for the Wii version of Twilight Princess, which was reversed because of Link being right-handed, the games' maps tend to follow Ocarina of Time's.

Some are actually thinking the southern half of the map is All of Zelda 1.

As long as the world isn't as dead as it looked in the gameplay. I'm all for big worlds, but sometimes devs can't seem to make them fun. Hopefully that won't be the case :)

As a diehard Zelda fan, I hope Nintendo isn't spreading themselves thin here.

A giant world in a game like this seems kind of pointless unless the game has like 20 dungeons or something.

We have no idea of the actual scale of the map. For all we know, it could be half the size of Oblivion.

There is no distinguishing scale markers anywhere in the video or these images.

@foxhound_fox: True. The video make it seem expansive but not necessarily huge. Though the problem remains the same: the devs need to know how to fill it up properly. Something which unfortunately not many devs seem to know how to do ( or do well, at least). I'm fairly curious to see Nintendo's take on that particular issue.

I have confidence they will do just fine. We are talking about a development team that knows that their current trend was getting a little stale and needed to reinvigorate the whole franchise again by bringing it back to it's roots while also rocketing it forwards into a new generation of development.

I think people might also be misinterpreting the use of the phrase "open world" with regard to this particular game. Nintendo and Aonuma have touched on the fact that they want it to be like the original The Legend of Zelda in that you can do everything in ANY order, meaning the game could have a fairly small map size comparatively to other "open world" games, but have a much more non-linear means of approaching it.

I'm most excited because of the non-linear approach opening the door for speed runs. Nintendo has always been great at hiding "expert" paths in their games that require amazing skill to get through in a particular way (i.e. in Super Metriod, many of the sequence breaks are not bugs, but design choices).

As long as the world is interesting to see and travel I'll be fine.

I hope that map of Zelda U is just ONE area, not the whole game world. We need giant desserts, forests, mountains, oceans, etc. That field should be hyrule field. One thing that most Zelda games always have is a variety of different locations.

Oh, and I'm going to pretend that I didn't see that picture...

@foxhound_fox: Doing multiple "quests" (in this case dungeons) at the same time would be top. Let's see how they manage that. I'm assuming this will be their main Holiday 2015 game, so they likely still have a full year ahead.

That definitely WOULD kill the game. There's no way they'd fill up 5 times that map, especially after seeing in the trailer how big the "Kokiri Forest" section was. Also the way the map has been broken up makes perfect sense.

Besides, the variety of locations is kinda what this thread is about. You can see to map change colour in the "Gerudo's Valley" section, probably because it's a desert, and if the bottom left part is what were the Snowpeak Mountains in TP, then that right there is your variety.

The map needs to be big, not massive. A sense of epicness can be achieved on this scale (Skyrim's map wasn't actually all that big, honestly), without becoming a chore or an obstacle for the player. I don't want to spend half an hour riding Epona through a forest, but I can handle a few minutes.

P.S. Is the skull-like shape in the top right of Death Mountain on the map intentional?

seems pretty close to ocarina of time

this looks interesting.

lol look how "barren" OoT world is. Who would play that?

It's pretty disappointing to me if this is accurate and the only towns in the game are the Castle Town and Kakariko Village that were in OOT. Hopefully Nintendo included some region or village that we haven't already seen. That was the worst thing about Twilight Princess, imo. Everything felt like I had been there, done that, and the increased size of the world didn't really make any difference. They need to fill the world with something, be that extra dungeons or extra villages.

If I was a betting man I would bet on the world you saw in the gameplay preview is exactly what it is gonna be once it's released. Nintendo is not known for their incredible AI, events ect ect in open world games like Bethesda and R* games.

Still gonna buy it day 1 though, love LoZ games.

It baffles me that people are worried about the game world being barren after seeing the demo. Its a freaking demo! To showcase a few gameplay concepts, it's NOTHING like it will be in the final game. They obviously haven't fully fleshed out the world. Stop worrying you wimps :P

Also, i have a weird feeling that they are gonna make the map and game world like a bunch of zelda maps stuck together ( parts from OoT, MM, TP, SS etc.)

Just give me the damn game. I want to explore that map.

Hopefully if things go well we can carry over links Kart from Mario Kart 8.

If this map is true then there would also be Kokiri village, Zora's Domain and the Gerudo hideout. If properly designed they could make the world feel a lot more populated. Oh and also Lon Lon Ranch, which, given its size in OoT, could be pretty big and lively in this Zelda game. This is without taking into account the houses and such that could be littered around a map this size.

I really don't think the devs at Nintendo just thought "new interesting Zelda? Bigger map and no extra content!". They've probably thought this through.

Looks awfully small.

all I want from the new Zelda is lots and lots and lots and lots of secrets and cookies, because at the end of the day that's what the adventure is really all about.

There is a low pressure system moving in from the east.

This.

maybe they should throw in some Pokémon to fill out the "barren" world also would make an interesting mechanic if Link had to catch them all