Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Was Basically Done Last Year, Extra Time Was Spent on Polish

wccftech.com:

There's little doubt that The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is one of the hottest games right now. After receiving global acclaim from critics, the much anticipated open world action/adventure game also broke sales records for a Zelda game and for a Nintendo Switch game, selling over 10 million units in the first three days of its availability. In the UK, it even managed to outsell Hogwarts Legacy, the other major success of 2023 so far, when it comes to boxed sales. That said, Hogwarts Legacy sold extremely well via digital stores.

As franchise fans certainly recall, Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was announced at E3 2019 as a sequel to the highly acclaimed Breath of the Wild. At E3 2021, Nintendo debuted a trailer and scheduled to game to be released in 2022.

However, in late March 2022, producer Eiji Aonuma had to announce a delay to Spring 2023.

We previously announced that we were aiming for a 2022 release for this game. However, we have decided to extend our development time a bit and change the release to spring 2023. For those of you who have been looking forward to a release this year, we apologize.

Aonuma-san, who worked on every Zelda game since 1998's Ocarina of Time, was now able to talk a bit about the circumstances of the delay. In an interview with the Washington Post, the Nintendo producer revealed that the development of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was essentially done. The reason for the delay was the team's desire to make sure that everything was 100% at their standards. Essentially, the game has received a long time for the polishing phase, which certainly shows in the final game's quality.

This was particularly important given the game's focus on physics. Still, given the lack of polish in so many