So it’s interesting that this game is going to closely linked with BotW as such does this mean it may have Easter eggs for BotW2 ? I did not buy the other warrior games if there was a link I may decided to buy this one.

what‘s other people’s views on this?

Someone with a more informed opinion, feel free to chime in. But from what I played for the first game, it was basically self-contained fan fiction.

The first game was just their typical Musou crossover story, something bad happens that is somehow drawing in heroes from other worlds. Go fight it. It's a really fun game and the definitive edition is 100% worth playing but it didn't do anything special with the story.

There's very strong potential with this games story though I think, could be patterned after what they did with Spirit of Sanada. They can pull off a good story when they have the proper reason to and I'm excited to see what they do with this.

Yeah. Hyrule Warriors was basically the exact same plot they have been using for most of the Musou games that aren't Dynasty Warriors proper. Warriors from different times and dimensions get sucked into one world and go at each other with armies. Eventually you find the big bad and beat the shit out of them a few times.

I suspect the old guard of Zelda fans is a relatively small minority compared to the crazy amount of copies sold of Breath of the Wild, so they just really want to slap that BotW branding on the Hyrule Warriors game to reel in all those new faces another time.

To steal some sales numbers from Wikipedia:

• Twilight Princess (9.97 million sold)
• Phantom Hourglass (4.76 million sold)
• Skyward Sword (3.67 million sold)
• A Link Between Worlds (2.9 million sold)
• Breath of the Wild (20.27 million sold)

They already did the usual fanfiction crossover Hyrule Warriors, so can't fault them for just going all in on making the next one Breath of the Wild-focused.

It seems like their musou games might be moving more and more in this direction. They already did something very similar with Persona 5: Scramble, which is basically the sequel to P5.

And I'm all for it. I'm not entirely against the core gameplay of musou's, but it's just not enough to carry a whole game with little structure or narrative forward movement. Scramble also did a lot to expand well trodden musou mechanics, so I hope that's something that carries forward to this, but with more of a Zelda twist.

@bisonhero: Those are some wild numbers, had no idea that BotW did so well.

I'm pretty onboard with this decision. I play and enjoy a musou game every now and then when the mod strikes and having a stronger core narrative would go a long way in keeping the game interesting and engaging. Also pretty interested to play it just because I'm always curious how writers handle stories with endings that are more or less defined and known at the outset.

To say nothing of them already popping the cap on this in Persona with the "Arena" games, which were sequels to 4 and 3's plots, but transplanted into a fighting game engine...with surprising ease, actually. I love those crazy bastards.

Hyrule Warriors was a big fan-fictiony mash-up of everything iconic in Zelda, no matter the context of its origin. Is it widely recognizable by the fanbase? Toss it in.

The new game looks to be actually fleshing out a specific moment left pretty vague from BOTW, which is kinda the most exciting thing.

To be clear, until this announcement there was really only one Hyrule Warriors game. Each of the three releases so far have been the same game but with more content added (and remixed a bit) each time. ie, if you buy Hyrule Warriors Definitive Edition on the Switch, you'll have 100% of the Hyrule Warriors saga thus far.

So for what that's worth, there's only one game you'd need to worry about picking up if you were interested.

But yeah, like others have said, the original Hyrule Warriors is completely non-canonical and pretty much is a device for crossover fanservice. There is a story, but it's pretty light. If there's any connections to the newer games, I expect it'd be cameos/easter eggs at the very most.

Not that we know all that much, but from what they showed it looks like it will be very different in scope. Where Hyrule Warriors was a big party with as many characters as they could cram into it, it kinda seems like Age of Calamity may be more focused on a tighter cast. They may well ONLY have characters from the BotW setting, as their focus seems to be on telling a coherent, canonical prequel story.

BotW itself is surely the only required viewing for this.

As someone who picked up Hyrule Warriors DE the same time Animal Crossing came out, it's something that is mostly mindless slaughtering of thousands of low level hyrulian mobs with a loose story stringing it together. I think I am about 1/3rd to 1/2 of the way through the campaign and it has been fun to occasionally dip in and just enjoy the LoZ trappings. As such, if you are going to pick up HW:AoC for the story, I bet you would be better served by watching a compiled cinematics video on YT and reading articles.

If you wish to finally try out a musou game and enjoy the LoZ table cloth draped over it all, probably couldn't go wrong with picking either up.