Last year's Zelda Wii U tech demo.

A Wii U incarnation of The Legend of Zelda game is still in the research and design phase, Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto has explained.

A tech demo at last year's E3 gave a first glimpse at how the Zelda series would look in HD. But while that experiment's visuals garnered a "positive reaction", Miyamoto stressed that Nintendo still needed to focus on how a Wii U Zelda game would play.

"With the last game, Skyward Sword, that was a game where you had motion control to use your weapons and a lot of different items, and I thought that was a lot of fun," Miyamoto told Entertainment Weekly. "But there were some people who weren't able to do that or didn't like it as much and stopped playing partway through it."

These controls will be "evolved" for the next Zelda, he added.

"We're in the phase where we're looking back at what's worked very well and what has been missing and how can we evolve it further."

Miyamoto explained that whatever comes next must allow the game to be accessible to a wide audience.

"We're seeing how the way that tastes are broadening in video games and you have some people who prefer more casual experiences, and you have some people who prefer sort of those more in-depth experiences. Obviously, as a company that's been making games for a very long time, we tend to be more on the deeper, longer game side of things. But really what we continue to ask ourselves as we have over the years is, 'What is the most important element of Zelda if we were to try to make a Zelda game that a lot of people can play?'"

"So we have a number of different experiments going on, and [when] we decide that we've found the right one of those to really help bring Zelda to a very big audience, then we'll be happy to announce it."