Tears of the Kingdom devs on reinventing Zelda: ‘Cheating can be fun’
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, which was released Friday on Nintendo Switch, brings players back to the Hyrule of Breath of the Wild. This time, however, there are sky archipelagos of floating rocks to explore, along with a vast underground realm that spans almost as much real estate as the surface above it. What’s more, players have borderline game-breaking abilities with which to construct vehicles, craft weapons, manipulate time, and swim through ceilings.
In other words, Nintendo made a massive open-world sequel in which it hands you cheat codes right out of the gate.
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Giving players this much freedom presented the developers with a fair amount of risk. With every new ability, they were giving players more ways to “sequence break,” wreak havoc on enemies, and, if not play god, then at least come pretty damn close.
After playing nearly 100 hours of the game ourselves, we sat down with longtime Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma and game director Hidemaro Fujibayashi to discuss the big swings they took in the massive sequel, whether the Majora’s Mask comparisons are overblown, and whether we might see Link, Zelda, and Ganondorf gracing the silver screen anytime soon.
[Ed. note: This interview was conducted through interpreters. The transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.]
Polygon: You’ve talked before about aspects of multiplicative design in Breath of the Wild — giving players the freedom to stack multiple systems atop one another and see what happens. Tears of the Kingdom goes even deeper in that regard. How do you account for all of that player agency?
Eiji Aonuma: When it came to making a sequel, it’s really Mr. Fujibayashi and the ideas he had. And a lot of those ideas centered
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