Roma said:     Nintendo, Wii U Zelda Wii U Will Be Set In A World Without Barriers July 29, 2014 sickr 43 Comments   It turns out the translation by Rev Level for the forthcoming Zelda Wii U may have been incorrect. The official website apparently says that the highly anticipated game will actually be set in an endless world without barriers and that Link will encounter plenty of new mysteries and some tough enemies. “In an endless world without barriers, the biggest one in the series yet, Link will encounter new mysteries and tough enemies”

What do they mean by "endless"? The only "endless" world is a procedurally generating world, and I doubt Zelda U is procedurally generated. For one, the Wii U doesn't have much storage space, so I don't see how a procedural world would be feasible. 

Wouldn't you actually need less space if it's procedurally generated?  Algorithms take up far less space than individual textures.

The procedurally-generated world would need to be stored in the memory. It's not the original data that's the problem, it's storing the data created from the algorithms. For example, Minecraft is a very small game, just a couple of MBs, but it can take 30+ GBs if you continue to generate the infinite world, since all that information needs to be stored so that the player can return to previous locations. The Wii U only has 16/32GB of memory, which could potentially fill up extremely fast. 

You'd only need to keep track of the alogrithms used to generate the landscape and regenerate it.   No need to store the entire world after creation.  A simple database table would be all you need to know what to regenerate, where, when, and how.

Eh.. I bet Aonuma is just messing around with us..

Not quite for regenerating it. It would work if the world was completely random, but to revisit areas and have them in a certain state, you would need to store that state. PProcedurally generated games like Minecraft have this issue, since all visited tiles have to be stored for later use, they cannot be regenerated in the same state on the fly. It would work if you didn't need to come back to the exact same environment, but that wouldn't work in a game like Zelda.

Sure but how big of a piece of terrain do you think is involved in the save state and how much of can be randomly generated?

Look back at the pic.   I could imagine large portions of land (each protrusion from a 0 axis point) being a single save state.  So you'd need basic corrdinates and a height map.  Then randomly generate the foliage and rocks.     More detailed locations or portions would naturally need a more detailed saved state but if much of the terrain is as we see in the pic, they could get away with a lot of random data.

However, I actually doubt very much this is what they plan and the game will have some form of boundaries.

Well it can't be spherical, unless there are some boats, since Hyrule seems to be a island in FSA, and then there is also the case of us not finding Holodrum and Labrynna anywhere, they are suppose to be in the same planet/area/whatever, so it would be strange not to find them. 

Though I suppose, he means "no barriers" as in no invisible walls stopping your tracks, we will probably get some uncrossable valleys, a huge chain of mountains or things like that, natural barriers that exist in the world of Hyrule, and do not feel like real barriers, but something part of the world, not some fake invisible wall, like some games do.

True, if they can leave out some detail thay can certainly save memory. It would make the world feel a little barren though, but I see what you are saying.

But yeah, they almost certainly will have boundaries and the statemewnt was more a hyperbole than anything. 

my money is on bowser.