So accourding to Anouma, the puzzle solving starts from the beginning. You can approach areas in any order and from any direction.

Neat. Cool.

But what about travelling to these places? What if you're an unlucky bud like me and end up travelling to the place where you get Epona, or any other ride, or the teleportation device or sprint shoes or whatever like, halfway through the game or even later?

So to stop people from doing that, and from having to go through the hassle of travelling a huge open space without a suitable way to do so for long (I'm looking at YOU Hyrule Feild in the first half of Ocarina of Time) they will likely give you the horse early. Maybe at the beginning.

I could see that. They pretty much did it in Twilight Princess, but kind of left you blue balled by taking your horse away before you even reach the main overworld.

Also the horse was pretty much irrelevant in that game anyway.

Holy crap they should definitely do that next game. Trow you in the middle of hyrule feild with no memory and start the game from there.

Oh yeah, that's true. They'll probably just give you the horse whenever the story comes back into focus.

I just need some bunny ears.

I hope there are multiple things you can ride on.. Like maybe a bear, or an alligator or a dragon. Oh please let me ride a dragon! I will scream ĺike a teenage schoolgirl if they show that in one of the trailers

Those are pretty random animal choices...

I feel like the game would have a linear start to get some basics in before it lets you lose into the open world.

Or... They could just design their game properly and have stuff happen with places to visit in a condensed enough manner that you don't feel bored going from places to places...

Just saying. ¬_¬

I mean it wouldn't be unheard of. Link has ridden a flying bear, a kangaroo with boxing gloves, and a dodongo in the Oracle games. As for a dragon, well...if I remember correctly, in the OOT manga, Volvagia was actually raised by Link as a child (this is non-canon, of course), so I could see a dragon happening. I do think the horse will be the first one you get though, and you'll get it in the beginning, for the reasons mentioned in the OP. I think it will be Epona, too, as that's just tradition. But other mounts? It's been done before, albeit in 2D and on a smaller scale game, so I could see them trying to bring that to 3D, since they're trying to change things up this time around.

Your sig pic makes me laugh every time.