Nintendo's Legend Of Zelda entry for the Wii U, once scheduled for this year, is "no longer making a 2015 release"...
NewsIf there's a game on the horizon just about every Wii U owner's looking forward to, it's Nintendo's next entry in the Zelda series. Touted as a radical departure from the linear design of its predecessors, the currently-untitled Zelda Wii U is said to be the biggest, most open game in the series so far.
But Zelda Wii U's breadth, it seems, is time-consuming to create. Originally scheduled for release this year, Zelda is now delayed, with producer Eiji Aonuma stating that his team is "no longer making a 2015 release our number one priority."
Neither will the game be displayed at this year's E3, as originally thought. The reason for the delay, Aonuma says, is because his designers have "discovered several new possibilities" during Zelda's development, which he believes will "create something that exceeds even my own expectations."
"As I have watched our development progress," Aonuma said on YouTube, "I have come to think that rather than work with meeting a specific schedule as our main objective, and releasing a game that reflects only what we can create within that scheduled time, I feel strongly that our focus should be to bring all these ideas to life in a way that will make The Legend of Zelda on Wii U the best game it can possibly be."
Really, the Zelda delay shouldn't come as too much of a surprise. We can still remember when The Ocarina of Time was supposed to be a launch title for the Nintendo 64. Instead, it ended up coming out in 1998 - a year after the console's European launch and a full two years after its appearance in Japan and America. The result was one of the best action adventure games ever made.
If the delays to Zelda Wii U result in a better game, then few fans will have cause for complaint. But Zeldacould have given the Wii U a much-needed sales boost in the run-up to Christmas 2015, and at the moment, it's not clear whether Nintendo has anything remotely as popular to replace it - unless the company has a winter 2015 launch for Star Fox planned, that is.
More Zelda news as we get it.
