With Twilight Princess as a starting point, Aonuma promises "sheer grand scale" for the next Zelda title.
In an interview with Edge Magazine, Zelda director Eiji Aonuma details his experiences working with the franchise and explains what we can expect in future Zelda titles. When asked about Twilight Princess and its reception, the director explains that their intentions were to create a realistic game of a grand scale, but feels that the team didn't accomplish this. The next Zelda title will focus on a grand scale using the previous game as a starting point.
"For Twilight Princess we used the adult Link and one of the interesting things about that was how we considered the precise proportions of Link and the world. The scale is because we aimed for a more realistic quality in the size of the environments of Hyrule and what that Link faced," Aonuma said. "But the question is whether or not we were able to incorporate any and all of the interesting game ideas that were able to take advantage of that kind of sheer grand scale within the Zelda universe. I am afraid that definitely no, we were not able to do all the things that perhaps with hindsight we had the capabilities to do."
His biggest regret when creating Twilight Princess, however, is the discrepancy between imagination and representation, and uses the recently released Spirit Tracks as an example:
"In the case of Spirit Tracks it was relatively easier, because regardless of the actual proportions between the player character and the other objects, we can simply concentrate upon the many game ideas we want to realize. But in the case of trying to depict a relatively photorealistic three-dimensional world, we have to be very careful to adapt the ideas so that they seem to perfectly fit with that world."