After Breath of the Wild soared the charts and took fans by storm with its sheer capacity for creativity, Nintendo realized there was still some untapped potential – and that's how Tears of the Kingdom came about, according to the now-beloved games' leads.
Speaking in a recent interview with Polygon, producer Eiji Aonuma recalls when Breath of the Wild first launched. Folks were surprisingly creative with how they approached its world, and this showed developers that the new "style" of Zelda game worked – and it worked well.
"After we released the game and saw what people were doing with it, we realized that this was the right direction to head in," he admits. "We saw that people were exploring how to play."
