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The Legend of Zelda for Wii U delayed, will not be at E3 2015

Eiji Aonuma, producer on The Legend of Zelda series, issued a statement today via Nintendo's Miiverse social network to say that the Wii U installment of the beloved series is being delayed.

"Since I declared at The Game Awards in December that the game would launch in 2015, the directors and the many members of the development team have been working hard developing the game to make it the best it can be," he says in a video statement. "In these last three months, as the team has experienced firsthand the freedom of exploration that hasn't existed in any Zelda game to date, we have discovered several new possibilities for this game. As we have worked to turn these possibilities into reality, new ideas have continued to spring forth, and it now feels like we have the potential to create something that exceeds even my own expectations.

"As I have watched our development progress, I have come to think that rather than work with meeting a specific schedule as our main objective and releasing a game that reflects only what we can create within that scheduled time, I feel strongly that our focus should be to bring all these ideas to life in a way that will make The Legend of Zelda on Wii U the best game it can possibly be."

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He apologized to the fans who were hoping to play the game later this year, saying, "I hope to use the added time to make The Legend of Zelda for Wii U into a game that will reward you for your patience, so thank you for your continued support."

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Or with:

In other words, "It will be ready when it's ready."

Furthermore, the official Nintendo of America Twitter account tweeted that the game will not be shown at E3, as Aonuma and his team will be hard at work creating it.

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Game delays aren't uncommon for Nintendo. They tend to wait until their games are ready before they ship, which to their credit has allowed them to (mostly) maintain a particularly high bar of quality across their releases.

The delay is also interesting considering that Nintendo's next dedicated hardware platform, code named the "NX," arrive as early as 2016 (though my personal guess is 2017). Some are already speculating that this new Zelda game could potentially show up on both the new system and the Wii U, not unlike The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, which was released for both the GameCube and the Wii.

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While this obviously has implications for the struggling Wii U, which now faces a 2015 holiday season with no obvious tent pole title (at least not yet), it's yet another case in an industry-wide trend of major games being delayed out of this year. Not long ago, Sony announced that their highly anticipated Uncharted 4 would not be out until 2016. This leaves Microsoft's Halo 5 as one of the few "system selling" exclusive titles currently lined up for the latter half of the year -- provided it, too, isn't hit with a delay.

This year's E3, coming in June, should be interesting as a result. While you can find plenty of smaller, independent games on this year's release schedule the lineup for all three consoles is suspiciously devoid of blockbuster "AAA" games. I'm anxious to see what each of the console makers decides to show and/or announce to fill in the gaps.