Zelda For Wii U Is Still In The R&D Phase

Shigeru Miyamoto, the mind behind most of all the top-notch franchises that have made the Nintendo brand a household name, was interviewed by Entertainment Weekly about a number of things but when it came time to talk about The Legend of Zelda, unfortunately potential Wii U owners won't be seeing a game released at launch.

Entertainment Weekly covered a bevy variety of topics, including Pikmin 3, the new Super Mario Bros U as well as Nintendo's reinvestment into the hardcore demographic.

Regarding Zelda, Miyamoto states that...

Obviously we stared that experiment last year and used that to sort of showcase some of the HD visuals. And obviously when you look at that, you do get a positive reaction to how simply having the HD visuals in a Zelda game can really make the game look wonderful and give it sort of a high-quality feel. But one thing that’s interesting is we’re seeing how the way that tastes are broadening in video games and you have some people who prefer more casual experiences, and you have some people who prefer sort of those more in-depth experiences.

Basically, what he's saying is that the original Wii revolutionized the way gamers interacted with The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword. The problem now is finding a new way to get gamers to interact with the fun-loving series because rehashing just for the sake of churning out a new sequel isn't really Miyamoto's style.

The legendary designer goes on to say that...

Obviously, as a company that’s been making games for a very long time, we tend to be more on the deeper, longer game side of things. But really what we continue to ask ourselves as we have over the years is, “What is the most important element of Zelda if we were to try to make a Zelda game that a lot of people can play?” So we have a number of different experiments going on, and [when] we decide that we’ve found the right one of those to really help bring Zelda to a very big audience, then we’ll be happy to announce it.

EW makes the obvious comment that the new Zelda game for Wii U is readily in the research and development phase, to which Miyamoto concurs.

EW does at least offer some modicum of gaming knowledge, hinting at possibly making the popular Zelda song-segments tablet based, making full utilization of the Wii U's GamePad touchscreen, which could be a pretty cool feature, something that Mr. Nintendo (Shigeru Miyamoto) also thought was a good suggestion.

So when can you expect a new Zelda game for the Wii U? Certainly not this year or probably not anytime during 2013. Still, Nintendo has a nice line-up of games both first and third-party that they plan to rollout for the Wii U over the course of the next couple of years.

You can check out the complete interview over at Entertainment Weekly.