Nintendo Explains The Intricate Systems Hiding In The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom

gameranx.com:

Nintendo has once again shared a bit on how their sauce is made, this time for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

As reported by IGN, Senior Director Takuhiro Dohta, Sound Programmer Junya Osada, and Physics Programmer Takahiro Takayama were on hand in the latest GDC, to present how they made the game, and in particular, three very impressive ‘physics engines’ hiding just beneath the player’s attention.

One, the idea of multiplicative gameplay carried over from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild to this title. This was the idea of bringing actions and objects together, to create an endless amount of possibilities.

And so, the simpler ideas of freezing or using magnets in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, was brought to the next level with The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’s Ultra Hand.

As Takayama said, they weren’t sure they were even going to pull it off. He said:

“When I first saw the prototype, I was excited that this was going to be a great game, but this was going to be very, very difficult. I said to myself, ‘Are we really doing this?'”

Eventually, Nintendo came to the conclusion that everything would have to work with physics, and they needed to assign some quality or ability to everything. In this way, Nintendo met their goal to make a world that runs on multiple physics engines, where all the interactions were built without any assigned use for it. In this way, the players would have to come up to solutions themselves. It seems that people playing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom may have been surprising Nintendo themselves.

Now as we know, Ultrahand does more than stick items to each other. You can build vehicles of different sizes and types in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and Nintendo had to build a different ‘physics engine’ of sorts for that too. What may surprise you is that building known vehicles, like wagons, required the programmers to work closely with the artists. This was to make sure that