Tears of the Kingdom's Ultrahand Mechanic Caused "Chaos" During Development

thegamer.com:

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is one of the most creative titles we've ever seen, giving players a handful of inventive tools and a physics-based open world to mess around in. Ultrahand is arguably the game's most defining feature, creative enough to earn the game an award during TheGamer Aces last year at the very least, though there were a lot of pains during development to get it implemented correctly.

During a panel at GDC 2024, attended by TheGamer, Tears of the Kingdom physics programmer Takahiro Takayama spoke at length about the struggles of creating a world and game reliant on physics. Upon seeing the prototype for Tears of the Kingdom, Takayama admits that while he knew they were about to create a great game, he also knew that development was going to be "very, very difficult".

One of the big issues developers at Nintendo faced during Tears of the Kingdom's development was Ultrahand, which isn't all that surprising considering what it allowed fans to do and how quickly they went about breaking the game as soon as they got their hands on the mechanic. Takayama explains that Ultrahand's high degree of player freedom in particular caused daily chaos, as problems with the game's physics engine would arise frequently.

I would hear things like "it broke, it went flying" and I'd say "I know, we'll figure it out later".

Gates were apparently a big issue early in development, as they were originally meant to be non-physics-driven objects, but Ultrahand eventually forced Nintendo to recreate them as physics-driven objects as well. This was due to the mechanic allowing players to move objects underneath gates, which would inevitably cause issues, with player freedom once again making development difficult.

However, it seems like all that trouble was worth it, as Tears of the Kingdom simply wouldn't be the incredible game that it is without it. Takayama goes on to explain that while development was rough, he was glad that players were able to experiment