Why Tears of the Kingdom’s physics are so mind-blowing

polygon.com:

Back in May, the gameplay clip that had everyone talking was of a lava bridge in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Developers were impressed by the game’s robust physics engine, noting that getting something like this to work in a game is an incredibly difficult task.

But why is that?

I interviewed two game developers about working with gameplay physics, and what Tears of the Kingdom does that makes it stand out from other games.

If you play games you probably have an idea of what I mean when I say “physics” but it’s worth going over the fundamentals because, like most aspects of game development, the more you think about physics the more complicated it gets and the more miraculous it seems.

The game programming flex of all time. pic.twitter.com/id2K5uE5mz

In games, anything that moves is basically either a canned animation, or a physics object.

“[Physics] covers things like collision, movement, acceleration, even character controls,” software engineer Cole Wardell told me. “A lot of it is trying to solve these very complex equations in a way that is both fast and does not cause a lot of error.”

Game physics are tough because there’s a lot of math going on to make us believe that a digital rock is falling to the digital ground in a way that doesn’t break our immersion.

As an immersive sim, Tears of the Kingdom’s physics are trickier than most. The interactions that the player can cause are incredibly complex. Wardell points to a door that is pulled open by chains attached to rotating tires.

NOPE FUCK THAT THIS PHYSICS ENGINE IS BLACK MAGIC. <a href=«https://twitter.com/hashtag/TearsOfTheKingdom?src=hash&ref_src=» https:>#TearsOfTheKingdom

<a href=«https://twitter.com/hashtag/Zelda?src=hash&ref_src=»