E3 2012: Zelda Wii U in R&D

Nintendo has confirmed that a Wii U The Legend of Zelda game is currently underway at a research and development stage.

“With the last game, Skyward Sword, that was a game where you had motion control to use your weapons and a lot of different items, and I thought that was a lot of fun, but there were some people who weren’t able to do that or didn’t like it as much and stopped playing partway through it,” Shigeru Miyamoto told Entertainment Weekly.

“So we’re in the phase where we’re looking back at what’s worked very well and what has been missing and how can we evolve it further.”

And according to Miyamoto, the game is at a very early stage; so early, in fact, that event the intended audience and type of gameplay experience are yet to be decided.

"One thing that’s interesting is we’re seeing how the way that tastes are broadening in video games and you have some people who prefer more casual experiences, and you have some people who prefer sort of those more in-depth experiences.

“Obviously, as a company that’s been making games for a very long time, we tend to be more on the deeper, longer game side of things. But really what we continue to ask ourselves as we have over the years is, ‘What is the most important element of Zelda if we were to try to make a Zelda game that a lot of people can play?’.

“So we have a number of different experiments going on, and [when] we decide that we’ve found the right one of those to really help bring Zelda to a very big audience, then we’ll be happy to announce it.”