 Why does Tears of the Kingdom have the same Hyrule map as Breath of the Wild? While the Legend of Zelda, Tears of the Kingdom expands the game world of its predecessor by exploring skies and caves, all of these new areas have literally been built on top of the existing Breath of the Wild topography. This is actually part of a larger experiment in Nintendo game design that started all the way back in Wii Sports Resort. According to longtime series producer Ijiya Numa, the decision to stay in Hyrule, not travel to a different land or do an unrelated game with a new Hyrule map was made at the earliest planning stage. He said, Although the previous title, The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild, has its own conclusion, we started to come up with new ideas that we wanted to bring to life in this already realised version of Hyrule. So our direction in making a sequel did not change. World director Takuhiro Dota has explained that this was an idea that originally came from Shigeru Miyamoto. Nintendo has long looked at ways of exploring familiar settings and environments from new perspectives. He said, When I was working on the programming for Woohoo Island during Wii Sports Resorts development, I remember Miyamoto-san saying that he wanted to turn the actual stages of games into characters. What he meant by that was to create one island and use that as a base to add various kinds of gameplay in different games. The idea of having new discoveries in the same setting was striking to me. I'd been wanting to try this idea with other titles and I suppose this game would leverage that kind of approach. While this was an interesting avenue of exploration for developers, it was not without its challenges. Many fans have wondered why if Tears of the Kingdom simply reuses assets and environments from Breath of the Wild, the sequel still took so long to complete. The simple answer is that the team were doing far more than putting a new coat of paint on an existing game. Said art director Satoru Takizawa, I keenly felt that implementing something new into the same world was actually harder than creating something from scratch. Although it is the same world, we want to make sure players experience it with a new sense of wonder. So to achieve that, we had to take a world originally made up of things we'd designed to fit it perfectly and then bolt a new layer of surprises on top of it designed from a different perspective. And we had to do so without erasing the familiar world, even though we'd racked our brains last time to put it all together. While the goal for Breath of the Wild had been to break boundaries in the Legend of Zelda formula, this time the developers wanted to see what typical sequel conventions they could do away with. For a team that had made multiple previous Zelda games, this wasn't easy. They kept falling back into familiar patterns. Said Aonuma, the word deja vu cropped up many times during development. We were supposed to be making something different, but the various things we made gave off a similar impression to what we'd done previously. But as development went on, we'd look at the game as a whole and sometimes discover that those things suddenly took a different shape because of the new elements we'd added. Until then, we were anxiously trying to change things up, but at some point we realised that some of them were already as they should be. While the team initially fought these repetitive tendencies, they eventually learned to embrace them. They came up with a name for this specific sense of Zelda deja vu, the great mundanity. The sense of doing something familiar but in a new context became the driving theme of the game. Said Takizawa, by the end, the definition of this great mundanity became clear. So even if a team member approached us about a deja vu feeling, we felt more comfortable asking them to intentionally keep something unchanged. The nice thing about sticking so closely to what had come before was it gave the developers the opportunity to revisit ideas that were simply unfeasible the last time around. Dota has explained how they were able to add greater depth to the existing Hyrule in a way that wouldn't have been possible if the team had started afresh. He said, Actually, the previous title, The Legend of Zelda, Breath of the Wild, was originally developed for Wii U, so there were restrictions in development. There were a lot of ideas we wanted to implement during its development, but we made clear decisions on what we wouldn't do in that game. For example, we decided that it wouldn't involve flying. Then Aonuma-san kept saying, if flying is out of the question, I want to dig underground. And we'd respond, oh no, please don't make us develop that too. Before The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom, we began by compiling and implementing ideas we couldn't include in the previous title. We wouldn't have been able to do so had we made a completely new world. So developing in the same setting as the previous game was significant in this sense as well. Thus, the team were able to build upon what had come before to create something both familiar and wholly unique. The moral of the story is that great things can happen when you take inspiration from the things you already love. You don't need to reinvent the wheel. Unless you're playing Tears of the Kingdom, then you might need to reinvent the wheel.