Nintendo Dismisses October Zelda Launch

Nintendo is dismissing rumours of an October launch for the newest Legend of Zelda title as nothing more than hearsay. From the GamesIndustry.biz story: "We haven't announced any potential release dates for the new Legend of Zelda title. Everything published to date is entirely speculation and we hope to announce more about the game at E3 in May."

Comments

SND?

[grub]

When a company's denials of a rumour make it to /. I know it's a slow news day.

Why wait? Buy now!

[aztektum]

Why not just stop by your local EB Games? They apparently already have it in store

Is pre-ordering a game really that necessary anymore? There was >1 million pre-orders for Halo 2 and I still saw plenty on the shelves when it shipped. I can even find copies of WoW in my area and have been able to since it was released as well.

Re:Why wait? Buy now!

[Ra5pu7in]

Try finding Devil May Cry 3 in the first week. It's a balance of the initial expected sales and the actual demand. Sometimes way less sell than were expected (>1 million pre-orders doesn't tell you how many were duplicates by people covering all the bases) and sometimes early demand is even better than planned.

It's also dependant on where you look and where in the country you are. When you live in a metropolitan area with populations over a million, games seem to sell out more often. Shop at EB Games and Gamestop and you'll find they routinely sell out - and never know how or when they'll get their next batch. Drive over to Toys 'R' Us and they might have a few copies sitting around. Ditto for Circuit City or Media Play or Fry's Electronics, which are not primarily game stores ... so they sometimes have a few copies sitting around.

Pre-ordering a game is only necessary if 1) it has reached a certain level of hype, 2) you know the store you go to is likely to sell out, and 3) you absolutely must have it the first day.

Re:Why wait? Buy now!

[UWC]

Bonus material for pre-orders helps, too. Wind Waker is the only game I've pre-ordered because the pre-order came with the Ocarina of Time disc. I didn't actually redeem my pre-order for Wind Waker itself until a month or two after it was released.

Re:More delays? 4 years running for this title...

[Anonymous Coward]

4 years?

The Zelda shown at SpaceWorld years ago was a tech demo that showcased progress on a previous, unrelated Zelda game. Look at the character model; it's very different from that of Zelda 2K5. It is the project that was put on the back burner to make way for Wind Waker.

Work on this new Zelda was started after Wind Waker. Aonuma-sensei has stated that this is a new project.

So this title has been announced once (@ E32K4) and delayed never. That is the deal here, fellow Zelda fan.

Re:More delays? 4 years running for this title...

[Anonymous Coward]

eh... this game was announced at E3 2004, which by my count is less than 1 year ago, so I'm not sure where you're getting your "4 years" from. Unless of course you're referring to the 'realistic Zelda' tech demo shown back at Spaceworld in 2000.

Furthermore, no idea where you're getting 'delay, delay, delay' from either... Nintendo has made no official announcement as to a concrete release date. They have said the game will come out in 2005, so until they announce it's coming out in 2006, you're delay accusation is unsubstantiated.

And saying that Zelda and Metroid are the only games worth playing on the GameCube makes your post seem even more trollish. I'm sure somewhere below we'll see someone mention some of the great games available of the Cube (Resident Evil 4 please)

Re:More delays? 4 years running for this title...

[satoshi1]

Instead we get some POS cell-shaded kiddie game.

Have you even played it? It is anything but a POS. Honestly, I'm kind of disapointed they went with the new look. The cel-shaded look was unique, it added style to the game and it looked damn good.

Re:More delays? 4 years running for this title...

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps you should actually try playing some of the games for the gamecube instead of just listening to what you're friends (who also haven't played any games for the gamecube) told you.

Try out Resident Evil 4 probably one of the best games for ANY system in my opinion.

Re:More delays? 4 years running for this title...

[TheGuano]

Have you even played it? It is anything but a POS. Honestly, I'm kind of disapointed they went with the new look. The cel-shaded look was unique, it added style to the game and it looked damn good. Ditto, WW was the first console game I picked up after YEARS of hardcore PC gaming, and it was such a breath of fresh air. The evel of detail, production values, gameplay...just wow. The new Zelda does look very good, and I think the "standard anime" style works in that it places the game in a darker, more serious place. But I also wish we could see more of the WW-style cell-shading. Guess there's always Revolution to look forward to.

Plenty of other games to fill the void

[PoderOmega]

Don't worry, I'm sure there are plenty of other epic and exciting Gamecube games to fill the void between RE4 and when this new Zelda gets released. Please respond to this post with the names, like I said, I'm SURE they are out there. I'm just not sure what they are called.

Re:Plenty of other games to fill the void

[focitrixilous P]

Killer 7 looks decent, recieved some pretty get preview style reviews, has about every ESRB violence modifier, crazy cool art style.

Donkey Konga: Jungle Beat comes out today, with arcade style play.

Nothing really on the scale of a Zelda game, but when in the past few years has Nintendo been about Quantity rather than Quality? I'd rather have one epic every 6 months than a conveyer belt of mediocrity.

Re:More delays? 4 years running for this title...

[SetupWeasel]

I wish they'd made a sequel to WW with the same style and engine.

I'm so glad I'm not the only one who feels that way.

Sorry

[Mike Hawk]

It was a POS. It was Ocarina+boat+flute-horse. It was so easy I finished the game without dying. You rarely fought more than one enemy at a time; the first Zelda was more intense. They have been using the same puzzles since A Link to the Past. Yes this is all negative. Yes I expect to get modded down, but this is not a flame, its accurate information. There is nothing left in Zelda to get excited about, except nostalgia, and they are selling that separately for GBA for $19.99.

Re:Sorry

[Guppy06]

"It was so easy I finished the game without dying."

So, did you do this while religiously following the hint books so you got all the heart containers and a full stock of bottles filled with grandma's soup? Because for me, who didn't look at the book until after beating it the first time*, that final swordfight with Gannondorf really smacked me around, much more than any of the end fights in OoT.

* OK, I looked in it once: I couldn't figure out I had to shoot light arrows from the hip (sans L-targeting) at the giant doll thing in order kill it.

"You rarely fought more than one enemy at a time; "

As if! I still have nightmares about those damned swarms of dink-dinks (or whatever those little fuckers are called). And they were the easy ones. Personally, I had to fight multiple darknuts at the same time so often that I discovered that they can be duped into hurting each other.

Come to think of it, that "enemies can hurt each other" mechanic got used a lot, and wouldn't be in the game (let alone noticable) if you didn't encounter multiple enemies at once.

"the first Zelda was more intense."

What do you mean by "intense," exactly? The game was good at the time, but without having your vision obscured by teary-eyed nostalgia, it's certainly not great by today's standard. If you're lucky, you might guess where the eighth labrynth by chance, but as for finding dungeons in the second quest, it was time to call Nintendo or get your hands on that first issue of Nintendo Power. Unless, of course, the thought of randomly bombing and burning everything for hours on end turns you on... And how are you supposed to know that the whistle opens up caves now?

Or maybe you're thinking of the action elements? Sure, the darknuts are difficult, but there's no intelligence in they're difficulty. Miyamoto's first attempt at putting fencing in a video game involved enemies that changed direction at random and could only be hurt in 3 out of 4 directions. There are reasons why he chose a side-view perspective in the sequel for the action elements.

If that's the kind of "intensity" you're looking for, go pick up a copy of Ikaruga, or maybe go back to FPS. These are supposed to be adventure games, and there's nothing adventurous in going up against a raw random number generator.

"They have been using the same puzzles since A Link to the Past."

Such as? After all, this is "accurate information" (and not, say, a statement of mere opinion), so you should be able to easily rattle off a list...

Re:Sorry

[MilenCent]

It was a POS. It was Ocarina+boat+flute-horse.

And Majora's Mask was Ocarina-Adult+Masks+3 Day System. Wind Waker's innovation had to do with game structure more than anything else, once the whole ocean was available to you, the WHOLE ocean was available, and suddenly the game became less about finding the next dungeon (of which there weren't that many anyway) and more about wandering randomly, finding cool things. Which was the cool thing about the very first Zelda.

It was so easy I finished the game without dying.

I finished Ocarina without dying. Then I finished it without dying, with three hearts. Later Zeldas have been light on difficulty, it is true, but have been cool for other reasons. Meanwhile, I know few modern gamers who can stand up to the original game or its second quest. Overall games have been getting easier, and when they *are* hard (like Mario Sunshine's void levels) players tend to complain bitterly.

They have been using the same puzzles since A Link to the Past.

And so has everyone else. The action-adventure genre as a whole has been fairly lacking in this department, possibly due to its very nature. The fact is there are fewer kinds of puzzles that you can put into these games than you might think. Press a button, flip a switch, find a key, special blocks, dual environments. That about sums up 90% of action-adventure puzzles.

There are exceptions to this, and if you're going to find them then more recent Zeldas are just about the best place to look. But I think Nintendo themselves know that the dungeon game is showing its age, and that may explain why there were so few of them in Wind Waker.

Yes I expect to get modded down, but this is not a flame, its accurate information.

Well, more accurately it's opinion, but that's okay. My comments here are opinions too. (Meanwhile, if you had said that on Plastic you would have been modded down. They even have a special moderation for people who say they'll get modded down, "-1 Modappeal.")

Dismisses? WHAT?

[alexandreracine]

Nintendo Dismisses October Zelda Launch

They did not dismisses a launch! Not even dinner!

Dismisses means they actually make an annoncement and then dismisses, but no annoncement was made!

(ET headline style)
The president said something terrible!

-The president of what? Who? More details after the break.

Re:More delays? 4 years running for this title...

[miyako]

I really liked the look of WW, but IMO it was barely passable as a Zelda game.
My biggest problem was the last half of the game, sailing around that damned ocean forever searching for triforce fragments and trying to get rupees to buy tingle maps. The warps helped a little, but it seemed to me that the game really failed where OOT shined, in making the world feel vast, but still dense.
The quality of the zelda games seems to be going down lately, OOT was really great, but Majora's Mask seemed a little rushed to me, it lacked the refinement of OOT. Four Swords seemed like an attempt to sell a crappy game just on the zelda branding (though to be honest, I never explored the game that much in depth).

Re:Wait a minute here!!!

[Zorilla]

Now, mod me down for being a dumbass, but if I'm reading that quote right (no I didn't RTFA), that's Nintendo saying they don't know when their own damn game is going to be released. Doesn't this strike anyone as ODD?!

Not really. They really have no idea when it will be done; they're developing software, not making a burrito.