Constructing Tears Of The Kingdom From The Bones Of BotW Was Tougher Than You Would Assume

Though The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom constructed off the in depth world map created for its predecessor Breath of the Wild, it wasn’t as a lot of a growth shortcut as you may assume. In a GDC speak on ToTK’s physics and sound methods, Zelda devs have revealed simply how a lot needed to be modified for ToTK due to the introduction of the game-changing Ultrahand.

As lined by Eurogamer, the speak defined that the Zelda builders went into ToTK eager to develop on BoTW’s two core ideas: the “huge and seamless Hyrule,” and “multiplicative gameplay”–where physics methods create novel options in-game even the place these options weren’t explicitly designed for.

The growth on multiplicative gameplay got here from the introduction of the Ultrahand, which basically modified the sport by permitting gamers to mix objects with virtually limitless potentialities. Early within the growth chain, this unsurprisingly resulted in plenty of chaos, with lead physics engineer Takahiro Takayama relating that he would typically hear his staff exclaiming “it broke!” or “it went flying!” to which he would say “I do know–we’ll take care of it later. Simply concentrate on getting the gameplay collectively and making an attempt it out.”

The answer to the Ultrahand’s many points got here with a significant change to the Breath of the Wild map the builders have been working with–essentially all non-physics-driven objects within the sport had to get replaced with physics-driven objects.

This resulted in adjustments to how some objects had labored within the earlier game–for occasion, shrine gates weren’t physics-driven in Breath of the Wild, however needed to be transformed in Tears of the Kingdom. This alteration opened up way more choices for a way the gates might be interacted with, and the way gamers may select to resolve shrine puzzles in ToTK.

“In consequence, no matter what we do, we now have a world free from self-destruction,” Takayama defined. “Gamers can freely specific creativeness and creativity, with out destroying the world.”