It’s a good thing that Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom uses the BOTW map

Tears of the Kingdom: The Legend of ZeldaHyrule is the same as in its predecessor. Breath of Wild. It’s true that the map has been extensively changed by the events of the Upheaval: Zonai ruins have fallen from the sky, sky islands float overhead, and rifts have opened up to a pitch-black underworld. Hyrule Castle is where it used to be, as are the Dueling Peaks and their jagged, slanting spires. Also, there’s the Gerudo Desert with its baking wastes. It’s recognizably the same place. It’s unusual to see this much content reuse in a game that Nintendo took six years just to create.

Prior to Tears of Kingdom’s release, some fans wondered if the sequel would feel more like a glorified expansion. Since the game’s launch, however, this topic has barely come up. Even the expected flood of comparison shots, or the laundry lists of what has and hasn’t changed, haven’t really materialized (although players have noticed that Zelda changed the decor after moving into Link’s pad). The possibilities are endless in Tears of Kingdom’s new toolkit, or the surprise and mystery of its new quests, players don’t seem to notice, or mind, that they’re literally retreading old ground.

Starting out, I had the exact same feeling. Maybe it was something to do with the game’s opening, high in the heavens on Great Sky Island. This lofty, untethered place with its windblown, novel atmosphere, and the sensational skydive down to Hyrule, below, helped set the mood for the rest of the game. It could have been the joyous feeling of returning to the masterful hands of designers who had the confidence and craftsmanship to let players explore the world in their own way.

Image: Nintendo EPD/Nintendo via Polygon

Either way, I began to hungrily gobble up the game’s secrets and diversions, marveling at the sense of discovery it could generate, without even considering how doubly hard it must have been to make such a well-trodden landscape feel somehow different. It looked familiar yet felt new, and I didn’t give that a second thought — until I arrived, by happenstance, at the Great Plateau.

It was a different hit. This is the Great Plateau. Breath of Wild’s Great Sky Island — a safe, sunny, contained area, raised above the fray, where players can learn the game’s systems and Link’s core abilities in relative peace. More than any other part of Hyrule, it’s scored into my brain; it’s formative in a literal sense, because this is where I learned how to cook, to paraglide, and to fight, and learned how Link would relate to the world around him in the game. I can picture the geography of this pocket world clearly in my mind’s eye. Encountering it in a radically different context was jarring — even emotional.

The following are some of the ways to get in touch with us Tears of KingdomThe Plateau has a wild, foreboding feel. Link is being pursued by masked assassins from the Yiga Clan, who are chasing him. It’s possible I arrived a bit too early. I was cautious and prepared as I explored. Once beautiful, the ruins now appear rough and jagged. There are also ugly patches of darkness around many gaping chasms. Even the feeling of ascending to this hostile new place was different than sailing down to it as in my first game.

Image: Nintendo EPD/Nintendo via Polygon

Exploring the Great Plateau is the most thrilling adventure I’ve had in Tears of KingdomThis is largely due to my memory of this area. Breath of Wild. Arriving at a place I knew so well and finding it turned upside down, approaching it from a new angle and seeing it from a new perspective, relearning my way around the space with a mixture of familiarity and uncertainty — it was like going back to a childhood haunt. It was like going back to a childhood haunt. Everything looked the same, but it also felt different. The feeling was powerful, even more so than exploring a completely new location.

There’s only one other game landscape that has made me feel like this, and it’s World of Warcraft’s Azeroth. Azeroth was upended, in a similar way to Hyrule, by 2010’s Cataclysm expansion — but other, more subtle changes over the years have had a similar effect on me. I’m sure long-term players of any other massively multiplayer game will recognize the feeling. When you live with a game space over time, spend so long there that it becomes deeply enmeshed with your memories of your life, and then come back to find it’s still there but has moved on without you — for me, this is what elevates virtual worlds to places that, psychologically speaking, might as well be real.

When I came down to the Great Plateau, to continue my exploration of Hyrule’s rest, I could see why Nintendo chose to stay with the original. Breath of Wild’s map. Not because it’s a masterpiece (although it is), or because it would have been too much work (it must have been just as difficult to rework it meaningfully), but because bringing it back genuinely adds more to the game than an all-new world could have done. It adds history, resonance and meaning. It’s been said, correctly, that Hyrule itself was the true star of Breath of Wild. What would the sequel be without its main star?