So I know we all had this spoiled for us months ago, but it's now officially here!

What do people expect to see? What do you want to see? Are we getting a straight 1:1 remake with pretty graphics ala the 3DS version? Will there be significant changes? A new dungeon? How far can they go without destroying the original game?

The next few months or so are going to be interesting.

Use everything learned from the brilliant exploration of BotW and build from the ground up. I don't want a new trend of Star Fox happening, just old games 1:1 with new paint. We can just go play Star Fox 64 (for free, too).

There have been so many QOL upgrades in gaming since the N64 days (many of them led by Nintendo). You gotta implement them, and that means a big, big redesign. A Zelda game without climbing any wall you want, for example, is going to feel archaic and stifling. I can see them sadly ditching the glider, which would be a huge step backwards, but being as rooted to the ground as OoT Classic was is a no-go in 2026. Times, and tech, have changed.

It's tricky. Graphics and sound are nice and all but I'd need more than that to double-dip. OoT is my *counts* sixth favorite game but a lot of that hinged on being an incredible experience at a very specific time. As @J.K. Riki alluded to, a 1:1 remake of an N64 game isn't going to blow people away. It'd still be fun because again, fantastic game designed by Nintendo in more-or-less their prime, but they should punch it up if it wants to be in the running for the best Zeldas.

I think the Resident Evil remakes (for the most part) have a good philosophy on this approach. RE1make and RE2make keep the iconic locations and monsters and such but everything is cranked up to 11. They're bigger, scarier, they reinvent sequences and build upon prior ideas. They give you new ways to solve problems and deal with monsters while making the monsters themselves no less intimidating.

OoTR would do well to adapt some of that. I don't think the puzzles have to lose their linearity but the dungeons can be further refined and exaggerated. Dodongo's Cavern shouldn't just look like another cave, crank up the fire and the BONES and creative bomb usage. Have Jabu-Jabu roll over at one point which turns the whole dungeon on its side. I dunno, it's been forever since we've had a traditional 3D Zelda dungeon, let's see them showcase what they learned since 1998. Skyward Sword had some incredible designs.

Just let me see them stretch their legs and get ambitious with the gameplay. A solely audiovisual change would be pretty darn underwhelming at this point.

Also, I'm hoping they somehow keep the subtle, ethereal tone that Zelda has. The trailer went a little far at putting the original on a pedestal. I dunno, there's a lot of this lately and it's not my favorite thing.

It’ll be a little tricky, because we did kind of get an expanded Ocarina of Time- it was called Twilight Princess.

Obviously that’s hyperbole because it didn’t hit all the same locations and beats and everything, but I hope they do the game justice.

Like, when I walk around Hyrule Castle, it shouldn’t just feel like a small building. Or when I go into the Spirit Temple, I want to feel the massive scale of the whole place. This is something the original God of War was really good at.

Basically I guess we’re kind of hoping this game will be like Ocarina of Time: Zero Mission.

My ideal scenario would have been an A Link Between Worlds style remix. Take Ocarina of Time's world, throw in a ton of twists and surprises, integrate some lessons on game structure from the past decade, make it a fun snappy self-aware B-tier game, bada bing bada boom.

I would also have been cool with revisiting the 3DS remaster, giving it another aesthetic once-over to recapture some of the lost mood from the N64 game, and calling it a day without touching anything else.

I expect that what they're doing with Star Fox—a one-to-one remake with photorealistic graphics plus a bunch of cutscenes—will work well for Star Fox. It's the absolute last thing I want them to do for Zelda, and even if it was the right direction, I have zero faith in their ability to execute on it. Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask have this understated vibe to their writing that I've never seen any other game match, supposedly thanks to Toru Osawa (maybe I owe Emio another chance). I'll be shocked if the seemingly story-focused remake can match it, especially given how insufferable I found the dialogue in BOTW and TOTK. (EDIT: On second thought, it wasn't so bad, but there was a lot of it in TOTK. The game relied on it more heavily than I'd prefer, and I'm not sure Nintendo knows how to quiet down. Bowser's Fury was phenomenal.)

Why can't I turn off subtitles in the Star Fox demo? If this isn't an option in the full game, what does that say about the seriousness with which Nintendo is approaching their self-proclaimed cinematic projects? In general, game developers shouldn't be allowed near the medium of film. Can you imagine how they'll butcher the credits sequence? (I want them to prove me wrong.)

Best-case at this point then, the relationship between OoT Remake and the original is the same as the relationship between John Carpenter's The Thing and the 1951 version. Two different tellings of the same classic archetypal story. Ocarina of Time is probably the best modern hero's journey; I'll give Nintendo the benefit of the doubt and admit that there's merit in simply wanting to pull from its narrative structure for a wholly new experience, if that is indeed what this is. That's actually more honest than a derivative sequel like Twilight Princess.

I don't want to be Cuccoo gliding on the road to Zora's domain for 45 minutes with no variation or novelty just to pad the game out. I don't want bad voice acting just because to omit it is "outdated." If they're going to do this, then they need to do it right. If they're going to make it new, they need to make it new!

Since the remake has been an open secret for months, it's irksome that we still don't know what this game even is. Nintendo, you should be fixing your leaks, not pretending they didn't happen!

Alas...we get a few more weeks/months of speculation and I'll indulge.

Graphically, I think it will be along the lines of the Wii U tech demo. Not 1:1 exactly but in a similar vein. Whether it was their intent when making the original game or not, like a lot of N64 games it had a dark & gritty look that called to mind "realistic" over "cartoony" and I believe they'll opt for that in the remake over the BotW look. They didn't show much yesterday but that's the vibe I got.


Now, what do I want? This is tricky. The original OoT exists, obviously. There are *ahem* ways of playing the original with all sorts of modern bells & whistles. So if they make some significant changes, I'm good with that. Should Nintendo do a 4K remaster of OoT for Switch 2? Yes, of course! It's baffling that an almost 30-year-old game, widely regarded as their finest work, hasn't even gotten an HD remaster. At the very least, an upscaled version of OoT 3D should be more widely available. The only reasonable explanation is that they've been planning this remake for years and years, that's how they've always wanted to introduce OoT to a new audience, and have only now just gotten around to making it.

If OoT remake is pretty much the exact same game with modern visuals, something like Metal Gear Solid Delta, I wouldn't be upset. In all likelihood, that would be the best version of one of my all-time favorite games. I wouldn't say "no" to that. But in this instance, my preference would be to see them make meaningful changes to try and take OoT to another level.

The RE4 remake is a good example. Of the three RE remakes that matter (we don't talk about RE3R), RE4R had the most changes from the original. But they were smart about what to change and what to keep. I've often described RE4R as retaining the "greatest hits" of the original, while "remixing" all of the in-between stuff. Iconic moments like the opening village battle and the courtyard hedge maze are intact with the level design basically unchanged, but the connecting tissue between these moments feels fresh. Consequently, RE4 went from one of my all-time top 10 games all the way up to #1 (moving ahead of, coincidentally, Ocarina of Time!). RE4 is a much more linear game than OoT, so it's not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison, but I think the general idea applies: preserve the most memorable moments and scenery from the original, but don't be afraid to change anything else if you can make tangible improvements.

Breaking down further what I'd like to see:

- I want this strictly to be a classic 3D Zelda (in the OoT-through-SS ilk) and not of the more recent open-world/"open air" games. You have a limited set of weapons/armor/items with specific uses. I don't want this to be a "go anywhere anytime, use any item for any thing" type of experience. I want to get enjoyment from the creativity of the game designers, and not from the game designers giving me the tools to get creative. Give me a million possible solutions and I will choose the quickest and easiest every time. I'd much rather have a limited number of creative and clever solutions to figure out on my own. Zelda is obviously going to continue in the BotW/TotK direction going forward; let this remake embrace the series' storied past.

- Go all out on the presentation front. Revamped cutscenes, voice acting, etc. The works!

- Dungeons should keep the same general layout as the original, but change up the puzzles and the progression. They should feel like the originals and be similar in size and scope, but also feel fresh. Kinda the same idea as the Master Quest dungeons, but done in a more thoughtful way. I'd be fine with them expanding some of the mini-dungeons; in particular, the Ice Cavern felt especially small and simple on my most recent playthrough a few months ago. Should they add a Light Temple? I'm not against its inclusion if it adds to the experience. Narratively it would need to be set before Rauru is introduced, so I like the idea of it being some sort of weird dreamscape set during Link's seven year slumber. Go crazy with it! And bosses aren't exactly OoT's greatest strength, so I'm fine with those being completely overhauled.

- The big topic, I'm sure, is going to pertain to the size and scope of the overworld. This is, I think, the most significant factor in how this remake turns out. And I'm not sure what the right answer is. I wouldn't call OoT a small adventure. While it's still really fresh in my mind, the size of the world still felt just about right to me on the last replay. And bigger doesn't always equal better; I know some will disagree, but give me OoT's Hyrule over Twilight Princess' any day of the week.

But I think once you've upgraded the visuals to the level that I expect we're going to see, that overworld is going to inherently feel a whole heck of a lot smaller and restrictive. So I think it HAS to be bigger, by default. The question then becomes, how much bigger? And how much more open? If OoTR is to remain a wide-linear type of experience like the original and not fully open-world, this is going to require a delicate hand to keep things balanced. And if it's a BotW-style open air game, now you're making something very different and you risk losing some of the original game's identity.

TP did have a much bigger world than OoT. And yes, technically there were more things to do in it. But it didn't feel like it to me. The amount of content in TP didn't scale up with the increase in size, so it felt more empty and lifeless than OoT as a result. I think back to when I was 12 and playing OoT for the first time. That game felt huge. To my child mind, it was like exploring a real world. Liberty City in GTA III a few years later left a similar impression. But TP didn't feel big to me; by 2006 it felt pretty small. With Zelda, I didn't get that feeling again until BotW. And it's not just about the size of the map in BotW, it's how jam-packed that map is with meaningful stuff to do, everywhere you look.

So it's a matter of, how does Nintendo balance being faithful to the original while also crafting a huge, epic adventure in 2026 that feels as grand as OoT did in 1998? I'm very curious to see what direction they ended up going in. It's probably going to make or break the remake for me.

To make a long story short: Honestly, my hope for the OoTR overworld would be what I was originally expecting from Twilight Princess. One that wasn't held back by technical limitations and changes in direction during development. I want the Lost Woods looking more like this:


Bigger than OoT for sure. More open and less segmented than TP, but much more gated than BotW. Size and scale comparable to something like Dark Souls 1? I think that's what I'm looking for here.

To over-simplify things, I'd be pretty happy with Hyrule Field being roughly about as big as the Great Plateau. Maybe a little larger, more dense and varied but that size seems like a good middle-ground between feeling vast while still not turning the game into another open-air world.

TheBigG753 said:

- I want this strictly to be a classic 3D Zelda (in the OoT-through-SS ilk) and not of the more recent open-world/"open air" games. You have a limited set of weapons/armor/items with specific uses. I don't want this to be a "go anywhere anytime, use any item for any thing" type of experience. I want to get enjoyment from the creativity of the game designers, and not from the game designers giving me the tools to get creative. Give me a million possible solutions and I will choose the quickest and easiest every time. I'd much rather have a limited number of creative and clever solutions to figure out on my own. Zelda is obviously going to continue in the BotW/TotK direction going forward; let this remake embrace the series' storied past.

The tension here is that it's lame landing on a new island in Wind Waker and not being allowed to explore it because you don't have the correct item yet. That sort of lock-and-key design has been antithetical to Zelda's open-world design ever since ALttP.

I think Animal Well had a great solution: you can do the four areas in any order, and depending on which order, you end up navigating them differently based on your arsenal of wacky items. I would love a Zelda game that really embraced this. The items in Ocarina of Time are pretty lame; they're almost all either locks that unlock doors (bombs, the gold and silver gauntlets, and the megaton hammer give you four different ways of destroying rocks!) or projectile items (slingshot, boomerang, bow, arguably the hookshot, longshot).

They could go all-in on exploring the wackier items like bombchus and making the hookshot usable on more surfaces, and then using those mechanics across all of the dungeons while letting you tackle them in any order. You're still constrained by cool level design that prevents you from trivializing the whole game, but you also get to feel like an explorer using your wits and being creative with your playstyle.

I still think Temple of the Ocean King is the pinnacle of the series' dungeon design for how it progressively unfolded over the course of the game as you revisit it. You end up finding shortcuts that let you skip locked doors to use keys later, you solve a puzzle once and draw the solution on your map to engage with it differently the next time, it's absolutely brilliant! A whole game of dungeons that are layered and braided together like this would honor the old style of Zelda while preserving the more creative gameplay of BOTW/TOTK and pushing 3D Zelda dungeon design forward in a really sophisticated way.

So I was pondering on the obvious paradox of them staying true to the original whilst still providing a 'new' experience. The last thing I want to see is something like FFVII Remake where they changed so much it doesn't feel like the original at all.

Pogue nailed it I think with the hope that this would be more like Zero Mission- The bones of the original are there with more added to it. Which is when the obvious solution hit me. Any *major* changes to the game can be fit in as post-game content. This allows the original game to shine in all it's upgraded glory, before completely going nuts with new stuff. And the best part is, it even fits perfectly into the story.

At the end of OG OoT, Link is sent back in time to reclaim his childhood and warn Zelda about Ganondorf's plans. This transitions into 'The End' screen (Which then locks the N64 instead of returning you to the Start screen, in an infuriating bit of old video game design.) Instead, this moment of meeting leads into a Post-game Epilogue, exploring this new timeline.

There's a few different things that can happen at this point. New side quests is an obvious one. It's also the perfect point for a new dungeon that forms part of a quest leading to Ganondorf's capture (Maybe dovetailing into the execution scene from Twilight Princess? Poor Ruto.) One of the crazier ideas I had was also based on the gameplay changeup of Zero Suit Samus exploring the crashed ship at the end of Zero Mission would be a potential switch of control to Zelda.

At this point Link is supposed to walk away from Hyrule (and get drawn into Termina.) Meanwhile Zelda faces the consequences of the new timeline alone. This can lead to playing as Sheik in a 'new' Adult section of the game. Again the possibilities here are plenty. There's plenty of scope for new content in the Desert area, a revamp of the Gerudo Training grounds which wouldn't cause too much of a ruckus. Even within the main story, there's potential for them to slip in a new dungeon for the Temple of Light right after Link draws the Master Sword.

Basically adding content which doesn't alter or step on the toes of the existing game too much.

That being said I really like ST's idea of revisiting dungeons at different points with different weapons. So many people just don't get the true brilliance of The Temple of the Ocean King- (ZERO AND BIG ).
OoT did actually touch on that slightly originally. There's a bombable wall in the Deku Tree that hides a Skulltula. There's also point in Dodongo's Cavern where you have to return as an adult with the hookshot and the Scarecrows Song

This might not be something they can really do within the scope of an Ocarina remake, but it's definitely something I'd want to see in a future Zelda.

@Shadowlink

I think about that bombable wall in the Deku Tree a lot as a way of threading the needle of giving players optional content without inducing completionist FOMO. OoT is full of optional side quests that you'd never know about without a strategy guide. That feels a lot classier and more organic to me than a quest log. You don't ever feel a compulsion to max out some number. If you want to bail on the mask quest after getting the skull mask, your only reminder is a cool item on your inventory screen. It feels like a valid choice to stop there, you're not being mocked by a half-filled progress bar.

I had the experience a few months ago of turning on OoT one morning and running around in my save file from replaying the game in 2022. I randomly ran through the castle grounds, got behind the fence, and felt the controller rumble next to the tree back there. I played the Song of Storms and fell into a hole I'd never* been in before. There was a gossip stone in there with a message: "They say that you may find something new in dungeons that you have already finished."

*I probably did go down there at one point in my life with a guide, and I probably saw it in a Let's Play once, but it wasn't at the forefront of my mind by any means.

For just a few seconds—until I realized it was definitely just referring to the two instances of it that you listed—this game I knew like the back of my hand seemed to expand in scope, like there were more secrets left in it that I'd never found. For that matter, I don't think I ever have read most of the gossip stones or spawned most of the big fairies or gone into most of the random holes in Hyrule Field.

I'd love to see developers put more secrets in their games that can't be quantified or data-mined. Stuff like this:



Even here, you can easily Google "list of perspective easter eggs in The Witness." Subtle gameplay interactions seem to be more resilient to this. There are a lot of subtle tricks in Mario Kart World's and Bananza's level design that I think basically zero people on the internet have quantified, to the point where you can replay them over and over and still learn new stuff.

The downside is that gamers will complain about the game having no point if everything isn't tracked in a list, but who cares what they think?

@Secret_Tunnel

I made it a point to read all of the gossip stones during my most-recent playthrough (like you, I never bothered to read most of them) and realized I never really needed to look anything up, ever. Even the really obscure stuff, it's all there in the game. I don't think I learned anything new from reading them, though they were plenty helpful in Majora's Mask (which I hadn't played nearly as much as OoT).

I really like @Shadowlink's idea of a post-game state in general. It's something I've always wanted, not just in Zelda but some other games as well (I'm sure some adventure games have done this, just nothing that comes to mind right now). There's always something bittersweet about completing a game, especially big epic adventures like Zelda, and then you load your save back up and it's pre-final boss again. I've banished evil from this world, and now I want to get the satisfaction and reward of being able to continue playing in that world. I want to ride my horse around, do a little fishing, and throw back some Lon Lon Milk w/ the fellas. I've earned that!

Part of me likes the idea of getting to see even just a snippet of what happens in the adult Link timeline after he leaves. Maybe it’s something best left to the imagination, but at the same time it would be pretty cool fan service.

And then on the flip side you can see hints on the child Link side of the events leading up to Majora’s Mask. Maybe they have some stinger ending where Link rides off into the woods to go find Navi after some period of time? Granted, Nintendo notoriously hates stuff like this, but it’s an interesting “what if.”

I don’t know how I feel about them retconning certain aspects of the lore, but in a way I kind of welcome it. Of course, it WOULD be cool to see most moments re-enacted exactly how I’d imagine. I just hope they don’t do an FF7 and implement some ideas I think were best left on the cutting room floor.

Since at least Wind Waker, Nintendo has started each game with a narrator giving the background of the game. Each game is always framed in one fashion or another with stylized artwork that might fit with that particular culture and time period. With Ocarina being “reborn” and with the obvious trappings of the tapestry in the teaser, I wonder if they’ll use that as the context for a modified retelling of the story. It’ll be the Ocarina of Time that we love, but different just like two different historians or witnesses telling the same story. That way Nintendo can keep everything that worked, but add to or expand the game as seems fitting. Easy enough to throw the light temple back in.

A bigger question I might have, will they ever pull away from the story teller and show us a kid being told the story? Kind of like Desmond in AC, but with a fuller interpretation. Perhaps they could even end OoTR with a cliffhanger leading into the next full (new) release.

A separate thought I had, if they decide to really change things up, is if they use a timeline where the Hero of Time, perhaps after his shade completes his mission in TP, is able to discover a way to reinhabit his body as a child. Then he simply takes his knowledge to attempt a novel solution to the problems presented.

Regardless, I’m looking forward to going back to this Hyrule. I’m hoping for a reinterpretation that stays true to the original, but with the specific puzzles, secrets, and locals mixed up, as seems appropriate.

@legendofalex That’s what I’m hoping for. Just putting a coat of paint on the same game would put a gigantic magnifying glass on the idea that the original game’s scope and scale makes absolutely no sense.

I could definitely imagine something like Kakariko village being bigger, and you could just go up the stairs and into the Death Mountain Trail, with no loading, just like in BotW. Really make it feel like a real world you’d want to explore.