Daily Debate: What Role Will Flying Play in Tears of the Kingdom?

Posted on February 24 2023 by Kora Burton

One of my favorite things to do in Breath of the Wild is soaring around Hyrule using the paraglider. My thinking on this in the past has been that the only thing limiting the fun is the height of whatever landmark you decide to take off from (and whether or not you have Revali’s Gale charged up). An obvious overall limitation, however, is that you can’t gain altitude once you’re in the air — it’s just gliding, after all, not flying.

It seems, however, that we may be able to overcome this limitation in Tears of the Kingdom. While gliding does seem to be making a return (with more paraglider designs possible), the past few trailers have shown us more solid flying craft, such as a plane-like device with wings fanning out like a bird or, more recently, a platform powered by wind:

Link also seems to be getting a lot of air-time — literally — in the trailers Nintendo has been releasing, as we’ve seen him falling through the clouds and catapulting himself upward via new abilities to navigate various skybound islands. Finally, the latest Tears of the Kingdom trailer showed off some new enemies to Breath of the Wild’s version of Hyrule, including large bat-like winged creatures capable of carrying other smaller enemies like Bokoblins. Personally, these new flying enemies remind me of Twilight Princess‘ Kargaroks, just more reptilian in design.

Now I pass the speculation on to you: what role do you think flying will play in this upcoming Zelda title? Do you think there will be lots of choices as to how Link can navigate the skies? What challenges do you think these new flying enemies will present? We look forward to seeing your hypotheses down in the comments below!