Are you hoping for something different from the new Zelda, which blew everyone away when it was announced earlier this week during Nintendo's E3 show?


Series producer Eiji Aonuma has promised that this one will shake things up, with an open-world focus that calls back to the days of Zelda on the NES. He's also talked a lot about ditching traditions and playing with the formulas we've grown to expect from Zelda games. This new one is no exception.


I spoke to Aonuma yesterday at E3 here in Los Angeles, and though he mostly wanted to talk about Hyrule Warriors, I couldn't help but slip in a couple of other questions. And he revealed something that I found totally fascinating: the next Zelda game might ditch the idea of puzzles as we know them today.

Schreier: I just have to slip in one question that a lot of people are wondering—Mr. Aonuma, you've talked a lot about changing traditions and shifting away from the series formulas. Can you give me one example of a tradition that people are familiar with in Zelda that you've changed in a big way for the new Zelda that you're working on for next year? Aonuma: So you know we've talked a little bit today about the puzzle-solving element in Zelda, and how that's kinda taken a different shape in Hyrule Warriors. But I think people have come to just assume that puzzle-solving will exist in a Zelda game, and I kinda wanna change that, maybe turn it on its ear. As a player progresses through any game, they're making choices. They're making hopefully logical choices to progress them in the game. And when I hear 'puzzle solving' I think of like moving blocks so that a door opens or something like that. But I feel like making those logical choices and taking information that you received previously and making decisions based on that can also be a sort of puzzle-solving. So I wanna kinda rethink or maybe reconstruct the idea of puzzle-solving within the Zelda universe.

Here's hoping this all leads into a text-based Zelda choose-your-own-adventure game.