We’ve received some new information about the development of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom and it was obviously no easy task putting it together.
There’s no denying that Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was a huge success. This sequel managed to meet and even exceed the community’s expectations. So it was obvious that sales followed, and whether it was from audiences or critics, we mostly heard praise for it. Of course, not everyone liked it, and that’s normal. Flavors and colors. We can never really achieve unanimity. However, sometimes the debates get heated. Especially when the game is called an expansion to Breath of the Wild or BOTW 1.5. However, when we look at the development of this sequel, we realize that this really isn’t the case. Especially with regard to a very specific argument.
The developers of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom speak out
During the Game Developers Conference, three important personalities from the Tears of the Kingdom construction site took the floor to talk about the background to the development. On the lot we found Takuhiro Dohta, the technical director, Takahiro Takayama, the chief engineer responsible for the game’s physics, and Junya Osada, the programmer responsible for the sound. Our three friends came back to the complexities of developing a game like Zelda TOTK. Your words quickly make it clear to us that it was a colossal task.
So we learn that the idea was to take up two of the main themes of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Namely the idea of a “Hyrule huge and open”and a “Gameplay Multiplication”. This last point refers to the game’s physics combined with alchemy, creating new solutions to advance in the adventure. From there development could begin. The main mechanism that caused some problems was obviously the one that allows objects to be merged to create something new.
Here we understand the full scope of the developers’ work and prove that it is not a copy-and-paste of its predecessor. Takayama says it himself: “When we saw the prototype, we knew it would be a great game, but also that it would be very complicated.”. There were even doubts because we knew full well that there would be “chaos”. And that was the case, with an example to boot. A clip of Zelda TOTK in early development has just been revealed. Takayama explains “The world collapsed, as they expected”
A bold but risky concept
On paper the idea was good, but the implementation was a different story. Our developers then went into further technical details. But the message remains largely the same. This fusion mechanic caused chaos during the construction of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. So after a while, as soon as a mistake was discovered at this level, such as an object that went to the other end of the map or broke, Takayama finally said: “ I know, we’ll sort that out later! Just focus on the gameplay.”.
In the end a solution was found. We had to make the entire world of Tears of the Kingdom controlled by physics. As a reminder, this was not the case with his eldest. Of course, that didn’t solve everything, and there were other complications. However, it clearly shows to most hesitant that this Zelda is not a simple copy of Breath of the Wild with a few new features here and there. Otherwise the development would not have been so complicated, far from the same.