One of the best things about Breath of the Wild was the ability to climb anything, but in Tears of the Kingdom it looks like Skydiving is the new ability we’re goingt o fall in love with. Today I want to have a closer look at Skydiving in Tears of the Kingdom, and talk about a few features Nintendo are holding close to their chest, yet to reveal in the trailers so far.

Before Breath of the Wild, Nintendo focused on their climbing mechanics to promote the sense of exploration and adventure. Anywhere you could see, you could go there, and you could pretty much climb any surface, as long as you had the stamina for it. Looking to freshen things up for Tears of the Kingdom, the Zelda team have focused on a new mechanic and that’s Skydiving.

Climbing in Breath of the Wild promoted the sense of exploration, adventure, but perhaps the most important thing of all, choice. On the surface, climbing may seem like a simple feature, but this helped Breath of the Wild feel like a true open-world sandbox, where Link could approach problems in multiple ways. You could climb around enemies, even climb on some enemies if there were big enough, or climb a mountain and paraglide over the problem that was in your way. Climbing was key to the player’s choice in Breath of the Wild, and skydiving could have a similar impact in Tears of the Kingdom.

Skydiving has been front and center of the marketing for Tears of the Kingdom, dating all the way back to the E3 2021 trailer. Previous to that, we had an announcement that Tears of the Kingdom was in development, but we only got a couple of pre-rendered cutscenes, which focused on Link and Zelda underground in Hyrule. Ever since that trailer we’ve been treated to Link running and jumping off Sky Islands, and other mid-air platforms, falling at speed towards the ground, then paragliding to safety or diving into a river. In the recent gameplay demo from Eiji Aonuma we had confirmation that the sequence from Sky Island to the ground will happen seamlessly in a single sequence, no cutting away or loading. I’m not sure we’ve grasped the massive impact this is going to have on the open-world gameplay, and I think it’s going to have just as much impact, if not more, than when we discovered climbing in Breath of the Wild.

It’s going to be interesting to see how the Nintendo Switch copes with this gameplay mechanic, given it’s likely to be fairly demanding on the hardware to maintain this seamless feeling for the audience. Breath of the Wild was a great game, but at times the system did chug along with textures popping in. I don’t think we’re going to have a Pokemon Scarlett situation here, which released in a completely broken state. This could be one of the reasons why Nintendo want to get the Nintendo Switch OLEDs in peoples hands, so they aren’t using their base model 2017 Switch to run Tears of the Kingdom in 2023.

The combination of climbing and skydiving is going to super charge the feeling of exploration in Tears of the Kingdom. Having the ability to climb anything on the ground in Hyrule was a fantastic feeling, but now we’re going to have various means to travel to the sky islands, then once we’re done exploring there we’ll be able to jump off at will. If climbing in Breath of the Wild elevated that sense of choice, then Skydiving is going to reinforce the sense of freedom in a Zelda game, and could elevate this above and beyond Breath of the Wild.

Jumping off Sky Islands is one thing, but we’ve also seen footage of Link running and jumping off flying machines too. Link has a large flying winged machine in the trailer, which looks like it could be of Rito design. This flying machine catches Link at one point in the trailer, and he bends down to gain control, however, in a recent Japanese trailer, we see Link running and jumping off it mid-flight.

Nintendo is likely to provide us various upgrades for skydiving too. We’ve seen a couple of examples in trailers so far. For example, we can see Link flying through a laser filled tunnel, with what looks to be a wing suit. Hopefully we’re not restricted to just using the wing suit in this location, and we can use it all over Hyrule. We’ve also seen Link flying with Tulin, battling against a huge boss-like monster, so I imagine this is going to upgrade out diving and maybe even flying abilities.

There is something we are yet to see in the trailers, and that’s mid air combat. I think Nintendo is saving this gameplay reveal for when players get their hands on the game, because this is going to be big. Nintendo patended a new type of arial combat suggesting Link can shoot arrows while skydiving, opening up the potential for battles in the sky. It’s one thing to battle on the back of this winged device, it’s another thing to battle while falling.

Looking at the patent we have three states. Vertically downward, with the character diving and pointing the bow and arrow directly down. We have a second state where you are diving diagonally down towards a target. We then have a third state where the Link is upward relative to the reference direction. This looks like Link is almost in a sitting position when he’s traveling through the sky. We’ve seen Link falling through the sky, and Eiji Aonuma demontrated falling faster if we choose. However, he didn’t demonstrate mid-air combat, and I think this is going to be very cool, opening up all kinds of possibilities.

In Skyward Sword, we could battle in the sky while on the back of the Loftwing, but this mechanic opens up the potential for big sky battles and points to more of Tears of the Kingdom taking place in the sky as well as on the ground in Hyrule. We have known for a while that we’re going to be travelling between the ground on Hyrule and the floating islands in the sky. This patent points to potential gameplay elements in the space between the ground and the sky islands and having to battle our way downwards.

Skydiving is going to be a huge part of Tears of the Kingdom, giving us the sense of freedom and choice much like climbing opened up Breath of the Wild. We’ve seen Link’s skydiving abilities will be upgradable through various wing suits, and I would love to see more things like this for the paraglider, and help for soft landings. Given we’re going to be jumping out of the sky on a regular basis, having multiple ways to have a soft landing is going to help us a lot. The potential impact for skydivining is very exciting, especially when it’s seamless from sky to ground like it’s going to be in Tears of the Kingdom.

Let me know in the comments what you think about skydiving, do you think it’s going to have a similar impact to climbing.