Nintendo’s keeping Breath of the Wild 2’s final name a secret for now

Nintendo gave fans a fresh peek at the sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on Tuesday, but the company is clearly not ready to give us the final name of next year’s game. It’s still calling it “the sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild” in an official capacity. That’s because the title might give away too much, Nintendo says, about what’s going to transpire during Link and Zelda’s next adventure.

Nintendo of America senior product marketing manager Bill Trinen said in an interview with IGN that fans will “just have to stay tuned” for the final name, stressing the importance of the next Zelda game’s full title.

“Those subtitles … they start to give little bits of hints about maybe what’s going to happen,” Trinen told IGN. In other words, you get to speculate for the next year about what’s up with Link’s arm and where the Breath of the Wild sequel really takes place in the complex Zelda timeline.

Of course, Nintendo has a tradition of being cagey about the plot, settings, and titles of The Legend of Zelda series. The company also has a reputation of showing its Zelda games very early, often without gameplay details or full titles. Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto gave us our first look at The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword back at E3 2009, with some memorable concept art featuring Link and Fi. It wasn’t until 2010 that we got that game’s final name and gameplay. Skyward Sword arrived a year later in 2011.

Nintendo had a similar build up to Breath of the Wild. Series producer Eiji Aonuma first talked about Nintendo’s plan to “rethink the concepts of Zelda” back in 2013. Then in 2014, we got first gameplay footage of the open-world Zelda concept. But it wasn’t until 2016 that Nintendo revealed the title, Breath of the Wild.

All of which is to say that this is par for the course when it comes to new entries in the mainline Zelda series. However, Nintendo also has a habit of missing its Zelda release windows, so when Nintendo said it’s “aiming to launch [the sequel to Breath of the Wild] for Nintendo Switch in 2022,” work that fact into your expectations for next year.