Think about games like elder scrolls . They are huge games which offer countless throw away unmemoriable npcs. Other than some of the guards and a handful of the more decorative npcs if i put my thinking cap on i could probably list almost all the passive npcs in oot, majoras mask, and windwaker. Not by name but by location, ruff description, and breif summery of their character and the kind of thing they tell you. Can they translate that into a really large scale zelda? I dont know. This game is bigger than we've ever seem before from zelda

Zelda 2 was very limited in the order you progess. Really no less linear than oot and others. also all zelda dungeons are relativly linear other than a few shortcuts. Zelda u reportadly gives you options in how you approch dungeons which is new.

Theres more to non linear gameplay than simply giving you the choice of dungeon order. All zeldas are non linear in terms of subquests. You could argue majoras mask was one of the least linear zeldas because there was just a handful of areas to unlock and a few dungeons but many subquests you could approach in your own order.

So it's going to be drastically different to create because they need to create more npcs than you can remember? I'm just not following where you are going with this.