Tears Of The Kingdom Skips Mountain Climbing, Link Smashes Through Ceilings Instead

thegamer.com:

Nintendo has just dropped ten minutes of gameplay from The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, revealing a bunch of new abilities. One of them will solve the greatest problem that open-world RPG players have faced for more than a decade - climbing up a really big mountain. Now, Link just smashes his head through the ceiling.

That's right, thanks to the new Ascend ability, Link can blast into the air as long as there's a ceiling above him. This means that, as soon as you're done exploring a cave, you can use Ascend to take you to a new area above you, and skip the annoying search to find the mountain path on the outside.

Related: Wind Waker Was More Innovative Than Breath Of The Wild

You can see Ascend in action in the gameplay reveal below, at around the 9:50 mark. At first, it's simply used to get Link on a higher platform. But then, we see its true potential, as Link smashes through an ungodly layer of solid rock.

This will make it pretty hard to ever get lost in a cave, since you can just smash your way out. It will also help you reach higher points on the map, which will come in handy if you get knocked off a high platform as we see in the gameplay demo. It definitely seems that Ascend was created to keep things moving along quickly, while also dealing with Tears of the Kingdom's increased verticality. On top of that, it has the added bonus of reducing the frustration that comes with falling off an edge.

That's far from the only new feature we got a glimpse at in this long-awaited gameplay preview. Earlier on, we got a look at how combat will be much more varied, with players able to fuse weapons together for different effects. Of course, there's also the long-rumoured Zelda-themed Switch OLED, which will