New ‘Tears of the Kingdom’ video shows Zelda doubling down on an interactive world

techcrunch.com:

One of Breath of the Wild’s best features is coming back in a big way. In a new preview of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, producer Eiji Aonuma shows off 10 minutes of gameplay from the eagerly anticipated (to put it lightly) sequel to 2017’s hit.

The video dips into a little bit of low-level combat and includes some running around, but mostly it goes over new systems designed to encourage the kind of emergent gameplay that made Breath of the Wild such a joy to discover for so many people.

In the first game, you could sail high on the updrafts created by grass on fire, get struck by lightning if you were wearing metal armor or cook a steak by throwing meat on the ground near a volcano. Many of the game’s environmental features were interactive and its shrine puzzles in particular nudged players to test out potential combinations of abilities, objects and their properties to come up with clever solutions.

Happily, all of that looks to be back and then some in the new game. Breath of the Wild introduced Stasis and Magnesis, two abilities that invited players to bend physics and move stuff around in dynamic ways. In Tears of the Kingdom, we’ll be getting at least two brand new tricks like those, one called Fuse and another known as Ultra Hand.

First, some bad news. The new gameplay video confirms that Tears of the Kingdom will again give Link flimsy, destructible weapons that explode after giving enemies a few whacks. The good news is that players can create their own weapons from items in the game world — and hopefully at least a few of those combinations are more durable than last time around.

With the new Fuse ability, Link can splice together a giant makeshift hammer using a branch and a boulder or grab a long