The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Shows New Rune Abilities

In a new The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild gameplay video tweeted out by Nintendo, it appears that Link will have access to a number of new rune-based abilities.

Ever since The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild stole the show a few months ago at this year’s E3 conference, not much was heard about the game until the recently-concluded gamescom event. Unsurprisingly, the game’s managed to scoop up the Best of Gamescom 2016 award as well, no doubt due to the title’s new gameplay mechanics and a timely innovation of the franchise’s well-worn formula. And now thanks to a new tweet by Nintendo, we’re all now privy to some of Link’s new abilities in Breath of the Wild, some of which undoubtedly played a part in its impressive gamescom showing.

This new tweet from the Big N is a short gameplay video from Breath of the Wild, and it introduces a number of new abilities available to Link via runes. Using these runes, Link will be able to interact with the environment in a number of interesting ways, such as creating ice blocks in water and creating a makeshift path, and extracting hard-to-reach items and chests from the bottom of deep water bodies.

In addition to the various environmental-based interactions, Link’s new rune-based abilities also allow him to do a number of creative things with objects, such as creating and setting energy bombs, and even imbuing items with momentum and a trajectory so that they fly in a particular direction at deadly speeds when hit with a sword.

Despite Breath of the Wild‘s delay to 2017, it appears that Nintendo isn’t holding back in trying to make the best Zelda game possible. Given that the title will feature an open world and thus a greater amount of freedom available, not only does Link’s new rune abilities allow players new ways of interacting with the objects and environments, but it will also allow for greater creativity in solving the various puzzles and problems encountered in the game.

While Nintendo has stated that Breath of the Wild will need to sell 2 million units for it to be successful, based on the evidence of Link’s new rune abilities and some visually stunning in-game footage of environments and locations such as the Temple of Time, it appears that the game should have no problem reaching that sales target.

[Source: GR]