Breath of the Wild changed everything. Two decades after The Legend of Zelda made the transformational shift to 3 D, Breath of the Wild reinvigorated the franchise with an open-ended adventure that was built around player freedom and expression. Instead of following a set path, players could go wherever they wanted and tackle challenges in a variety of ways. That philosophy filtered down to subsequent games, letting players author their own creative solutions to puzzles in titles like Tears of the Kingdom and Echoes of Wisdom . As a result, Zelda has never been bigger , and the traditional, more linear Zelda games had become a thing of the past …
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