leaks

Breath of the Wild 2 Leaks Roundup

Breath of the Wild 2 is currently scheduled for spring 2023, and Nintendo are yet to give us the big update that everyone wants so far in 2022. We’ve had the bad news earlier this year with confirmation of the delay, and with that delay and a lack of a name, room has been left for speculation and so-called “leaks” have filled that information gap. Today I am going to round up some of the best leaks we’ve seen, although I would take anything you hear today with a huge pinch of salt.

Before we get into todays topic I’d love to hear from you and what you want to see in Breath of the Wild 2. Do you want to see Zelda as a playable character, Dungeons make a return, or do you want to travel in time? Share your ideas in the comments with the community.

Today I am going to talk about “leaks”. They may be real, they may be fake, that’s the thing about leaks, you never really know, especially in 2022 and the state of the internet these days. Anyone can post online saying their uncle works for Nintendo, or they have “inside information”. From my point of view, it’s a silly bit of fun, and they most likely are untrue… however, if we like the sound of a leak, you never know, it might just come true!

Without further delay, let’s get into it. I’m going to start out with leaks from 4chan, which were then reposted on reddit by u/GreedyJuice6669.

I’m going to sort through the leaks and categorise them. Some are blatantly obvious, some are related to the story and some are related to game mechanics.

Obvious:

  • Game difficulty is the same. Not harder or easier – This is to be expected
  • Mostly the same enemies with some “evolutions” – Again, this is standard for sequels, you’d expect some similarities for continuity, but some new features because ‘sequel’
  • Setup is like the first game just a more dramatic intro – This sounds kind of pointless to me
  • Lots of Ocarina of Time references – Yes, this makes sense… this was one of the most popular Zelda games in the past
  • Takes place almost immediately after BOTW1 – I think we know this one already
  • More traditional Link Ganon Zelda plot

Gameplay

  • More traditional dungeons as well as a replacement for shrines which are even older ruins located all over the overworld – This seems to be what fans want, the return of Dungeons, and in the first trailer we had a shot of a big door, which could be a Dungeon.
  • New underground enemies that can play around with time mechanics – We’ve seen Link play with time through an ability, he appears to rewind time, but we havent seen anything related to enemies ‘playing with time’, what that could mean we don’t know
  • Items still have the same durability, but there are some enemies that have a time reversal mechanic that ends up with your weapons healing each time you strike them – Here’s another reference to ‘enemies effecting time’, although having enemies be able to manipulate time, and restoring your weapons, doesn’t seem to make sense to me. If I was an enemy in Breath of the Wild and I could manipulate time, then I’d turn Link into a baby so he couldn’t hurt me, not restore his weapons so he could kill me.
  • Zelda plays a role in character swap mechanic, she’s in another dimension and you have to switch characters for puzzles to influence the regular hyrule overworld and vice versa. Lots of teamwork between Link and Zelda – This is another major ask from fans, a playable Zelda character. I do think the swap mechanic could be feasible, although having her in another dimension seems odd. I could imagine her being underground, and Link being overground based on what we’ve seen so far.
  • Zelda has the Shekiah slate, no real combat for her from what was played, mostly stealth and puzzle solving for Zelda. No gear, inventory is just materials and quests – This is an interesting one. From what we have seen so far, Link appears to have new abilities related to his arm. One version of Link has long hair, and his right arm appears to be corrupted, plus in another scene we’ve seen him with an attachment on his left arm. If Zelda is going to be playable, then it makes sense for her to use the Shekiah Slate… However, it says here she doesn’t have items and she can only engage in stealth, which seems a little bit limiting to me.
  • Link only uses the new powers from the Sages while Zelda uses slate features from BOTW1 – This seems to follow up on the previous point
  • Six total dungeons – Six Dungeon does seem a little low to me, but then again we only had 4 Divine Beasts in the original and that turned out just great. In my head I was thinking 8, but maybe that’s asking too much.
  • Never saw Ganon but from what he saw he can understand that the undead form of Ganon is invincible and Link/Zelda have to work to restore Ganon’s physical prime form to be able to injure him – This is entirely new to me, and sounds interesting. In the trailers we see Ganondorf’s corpse held in place with this arm, so in theory he could be invincible.
  • Duel weilding swords – This changes up the gameplay mechanics a lot with the option of dual weilding weapons. I like the idea of this and would love to see it!

Story

  • Reason for not having the Master Sword is that Link returned it to the KorokForest, which is now floating in the sky – This one could be debunked already, given we have seen the Master Sword. It looks broken though, so maybe it got broken somewhere along the line.
  • Plot revolves around time manipulation and another dimension – Time manipulation AND another dimension sounds like a lot to follow. I could see time manipulation, or another dimension, but both? In theory you are combining Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time here in one, which sounds great on paper, but in practice I am not sure thematically how that would work out.

The last few are statements

  • “Surrealist” tone
  • “Kill the past” story about champions taking place as new sages

There’s a lot to unpack here. As to whether it’s true or not, I don’t know. There are a lot of ‘crowd pleasers’ in here; playable Zelda, Dungeons, Time Travel. All good stuff. Although some of the points do seem a little muddled or confused, which leads to me think it’s fake. I am unsure if time travel and dimension hopping is a good idea, sounds like it would get very messy and complicated. Plus invincible zombie Ganondorf, and only six dungeons… hopefully that last one is definitely fake!

Let’s move on and have a look at some other leaks. These have been posted on Weibo, which is a Chinese version of Twitter, and subsequently got picked up by SwitchForce and featured on their channel. These leaks aren’t as dramatic as the 4chan/reddit leaks, but interesting all the same… and one of them lines up with one of the 4chan leaks, so it could be true. Apparently this info comes from a contractor who worked at Nintendo (but knowing software development and contracting a little bit, you’d be insane to leak details like this, it would literally kill your career).

First of all, the Shekiah Slate is coming back. Given the Shekiah Slate is in Zelda’s possession by the end of Breath of the Wild, that’s led fans to hope Zelda is playable, with the Shekiah Slate in hand to give her abilities. We have seen Link has abilities related to his fancy new arm, which leaves Zelda to use the Shekiah Slate.

The second leak is much less exciting. Nintendo are set to introduce a new game plus mode, where you get to carry over weapons and abilities into a new playthrough of the game. This is a standard feature these day for other big AAA releases, but we are yet to see Nintendo implement this for The Legend of Zelda.

As ever, I would take all this information with a huge pinch of salt. It could be information leaked by a contrator working at Nintendo during the development of Breath of the Wild, or it could be some random guy or girl on the internet making it all up for kicks.

Let me know in the comments what you think of the so-called leaks. If one of them were to turn out to be true, which one do you want?

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