While there’s obviously a lot of excitement about The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, there’s also a certain amount of consternation and concern about the scope of the game’s new content. Tears of the Kingdom largely reuses the Hyrule from Breath of the Wild, while adding new sky islands, and possibly (it hasn’t been confirmed) additional underground areas. The concern is these new sky islands simply won’t be that significant, providing only limited territory and secrets to explore.
Well, perhaps you can put your mind at ease. Last month, we got our first real The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom gameplay showcase, most of which took place on a single one of the game’s new sky islands. Well, clever fans managed to piece together a map of the island in the showcase, and using coordinates seen on the game’s minimap, approximate fairly accurately its size. They then placed it on the map of Hyrule at the proper location.
Now, the image provided is rather zoomed in, so it doesn’t actually give you that clear an idea of the island’s scale. So, I went the extra step and placed the island on the full map of Hyrule (map courtesy of the folks at Zelda Dungeon). Click the image for full resolution.
As you can see, the island explored in the Tears of the Kingdom showcase is actually quite significant. Comparable in size to the Great Plateau staring area from Breath of the Wild (which I’ve circled in red). Anyone who’s played BotW knows the Great Plateau was an area you could quite contentedly explore for several hours if you wanted to. While not all of TotK’s sky islands will be as big as the one from the showcase, shots of the game’s horizon shows there are at least a few as big just in visible range.
So, will Tears of the Kingdom have a new world as big as Breath of the Wild’s? No, but worries that we’re only getting skimpy postage-stamp-sized additions are unfounded. If you added all the new sky islands together, you’d probably get a landmass at least the size of a more traditional pre-BotW Zelda.
Meanwhile, in addition to mapping out the Tears of the Kingdom showcase island, there’s plenty of speculation about the nature of these islands. Many have fixated on the gold-leaved trees on the islands, which producer Eiji Aonuma have said will only be found in the sky. This has led many to surmise that the sky islands are actually remnants of the Sacred or Golden Realm from past Zeldas, but, of course, that’s yet to be confirmed.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom arrives on Nintendo Switch on May 12.
