What would ur ideal length between major 3D entries? 3 years sounds like a nice sweet spot to me.

3 years is good. 4 if it's something pretty big and ambitious, but nothing justify 5. Nothing. Even more when you hear that after 5 years there are other developers with finished bigger games that had to come to help development and be able to finish "in time".

I'd much rather they take their time with Zelda even if it takes 5 years rather then have it in 3 years and it being rushed, the's a lot more to development then most of you think, one aspect that increases development time is how they tend to be built from the ground up with new engines. Coding a new engine alone can take year easily and a lot of the time it takes more, then you apply the assets to it and sort out any problems that arise which can add another year and a half to it all the while you're trying to balance performance mean while you're coordinating with the team creating the asset and then the is the design phase which can take a long time for a mechanics based game like Zelda which uses multiple mechanics. Developers have completed bigger games in less time yeah but how many of those games are polished with minimal bugs, glitches and performance issues as well as being well optimized for the platform to push it.

5 years is actually what it would take to develop a large game that isn't marred by the issue a number of games have at release now days, it's not as easy as people think.

Twilight Princess (4 years) and Skyward Sword (5 years) had game breaking bugs. So no.

Read the post again, compared to the many bugs other games had Zelda does really well in that regard. So yeah.

And there are very well polished games made in less time. So no.

Again, the team needs to be efficient and make the correct decisions. If making an open world game was a problem, they should have left a smaller team doing that for a future Zelda title while the main one works on a near project. On top of that, we don't have any confirmation about the engine that the Zelda team is using, as past games from OoT to TP used the same modified version from SM64.

And how many of those games are like Zelda in design and approach?

OOT was in development since the SNES.

Okami?

And each genre has different barriers, not only Zelda games. Those games may be more difficult to develop than a Zelda game.

On top of that, OoT was the first 3D Zelda game. Is this one 4D? 5D? or something never done before? Ah, no. It's just HD, like all those thousands of games been released since last gen.

Can you really say it's 5 years. When a Zelda game does come out on the handheld. New Zelda's coming out fairly often.

Okami is a good Zelda clone but weak Zelda game, the bosses and dungeons are nowhere near the level of any Zelda game as is the enemy design, the mechanic is good as is the visual approach but the are a number of things it lacks if it where part of the series.

Just HD? Were you asleep for the last gen? One of the reasons last gen lasted so long is that it took developers ages to grasp HD development, even this gen it takes time for HD game, not to mention the team don't only just work on one game.