Nintendo announced their first DLC bundle for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, called The Cave of Trials, set for launch in summer 2017.
The second DLC pack will include an expanded story, more challenges, and a new dungeon. It will be released in Holiday 2017. The DLC pass will cost $20.
Breath of the Wild DLC contents
A single DLC or Expansion Pass will include both bundles of game content, and although not all of the new features will be available at purchase, players can immediately enjoy finding three new treasure chests to be found in the Great Plateau. According to Nintendo, they will contain new clothes and useful items.
Only the contents of the first DLC pack have been specified. The most interesting feature appears to be the Trial of the Sword, which would correspond to the Cave of Trials Challenge. Link will have to face waves of enemies, starting without any weapons or armor. After all enemies in a room have been defeated, the player may proceed to the next area, much like Wind Waker’s trials. After completing 45 rooms, Link will unlock the true power of the Master Sword, which will be glowing for the remainder of the game.
Zelda has been characterized by being a game series with an exciting, yet challenging, difficulty curve. As years pass and consoles get upgraded, Zelda titles have become easier with time, although never easy enough for one to just breeze through the game. For Breath of the Wild, Nintendo chose to implement a Hard Mode to raise replayability in a game that let players enjoy an immensely vast world, filled with treasure and challenging enemies. While playing in Hard Mode, the player will face stronger enemies that never appear in the regular game. They will also heal faster during battle and will be harder to attack while Link is hidden from sight.
One of the new in-game chests will include a shirt with the Nintendo Switch logo for Link to wear. A total of eight new items ill be added to the game, most of them inspired by Nintendo and Zelda lore, such as Majora’s Mask and Tingle.
Another of the items to find is the Travel Medallion, which is hidden in a chest somewhere in the world. It will allow the player to create a checkpoint that will allow Link to teleport there at any time, similar to Farore’s Wind in Ocarina of Time. Only one Travel Medallion location can be set up at the same time.
There’s also the Korok Mask, which will allow players to find hidden Koroks much easier. Whenever a Korok is nearby, and Link is wearing the mask, the mask will start shaking as Link approaches the Korok. There are 900 Korok seeds in total, and only a few people have accomplished finding them all. After doing so, Hestu will give Link “Hestu’s Gift,” and apparently, it does not do much more than make Hestu dance.
Lastly, there’s a new and exciting feature known as Hero’s Path, a great addition to any RPG. Since the world on Breath of the Wild is so massive, Nintendo implemented Hero’s Path to help players take note of the places they visit, marking their steps on the map. Hero’s Path will keep track of the last 200 hours of game time, which is still a lot because one of the players who collected all Korok seeds had just over 170 registered hours of game time. Having a record of places that have been visited will allow players to fully explore the world in Breath of the Wild, including Shrines that remain unconquered and potential Korok locations.
New voiceovers without needing the DLC
If buying the DLC pass is not an option, then players can continue to enjoy new content by simply connecting their console to the Internet and downloading the latest update for Breath of the Wild, which is 1.2.0, adding options for changing the spoken language of the characters.
The game will now support French, Canadian French, Spanish, Latin American Spanish, German, Italian, Russian, Japanese, and English. The update is now available on both Nintendo Switch and Wii U. It can be obtained from the console’s eShop.
Players are somewhat uninspired by Nintendo’s choice to use DLC to provide new content on existing games, although Nintendo has had enough experience concerning expansions and add-ons to their games and consoles. Pretty much all of their systems have some sort of peripheral to add more content to their games, and in most cases, the experiment resulted in losses for the company.
It is much simpler to offer downloadable content for an existing game, reducing shipping and manufacturing costs, as the player will only have to go online to enjoy more of a game that he or she already has in its possession, which is pretty much what Nintendo has aimed for with its many console-based peripherals.
Source: Gamespot