Nintendo is hiring a level designer for Zelda, but will it be for a new game?

By Gabe Gurwin May 7, 2018

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has only been out for a little more than a year, but it appears Nintendo is gearing up for Link’s next big adventure. A new job listing for a level designer has been posted on the company’s website, and it certainly sounds like a sequel of some sort is in the works.

The listing is understandably vague, as Nintendo doesn’t want to show its hand too early, but the job description — translated from Japanese — includes tasks such as “dungeon and field planning.” It also mentions “planning” enemies, which likely means deciding where they will be placed in the game world.

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The “dungeon” term is interesting, as Breath of the Wild mostly moved away from traditional Zelda dungeons in favor of an open and emergent approach to world design. Rather than enter a clearly marked dungeon and complete it in a linear fashion, the game relied on smaller passages and the puzzle-based “shrines” scattered throughout the world. The Divine Beasts, however, could be classified as dungeons, if Nintendo were to take this approach with another game.

It’s also possible that Nintendo is developing another top-down title similar to A Link Between Worlds on 3DS. In 2017, longtime series producer Eiji Aonuma told Game Informer that there was “definitely a possibility” that the 3DS Zelda team would work on a game for the Nintendo Switch.

Since the Nintendo 64 era, the series has generally stuck 3D games on home consoles and 2D games on handheld ones, but there have been occasional exceptions. The GameCube game Four Swords Adventures took the top-down approach of the Four Swords Game Boy Advance game and made it work on the big screen, and both Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask made the move to the 3DS with great success as well.

The last top-down Zelda game, the 3DS-exclusive multiplayer title The Legend of Zelda: Tri Force Heroes, didn’t receive the best reviews. Though praised for its cooperative gameplay, it was criticized for being less interesting in solo mode and for its lack of polish. Its predecessor A Link Between Worlds, on the other hand, is one of the best-reviewed games on the 3DS.

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