Tuesday, May 23rd 2023
Nintendo Spent a Year Polishing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
Nintendo famously announced last March that its much anticipated sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was getting delayed to May 2023. The Japanese developer offered a profuse apology - fans were expecting Tears of the Kingdom to arrive at some point in 2022, but the EPD Production Group (No. 3) ultimately required some extra months to finalize their intended vision. The game's producer, Eiji Aonuma, was tasked with delivering the bad news back then - he has now admitted that his blockbuster open world adventure was essentially feature complete at the time. In an expansive interview conducted by the Washington Post this week, Aonuma-san says that the launch was postponed in order "to make sure that everything in the game was 100 percent to our standards."
The discussion turns to the game's very involved (possibly Havok-derived) physics engine - said to be more complex than examples running within the most expensive AAA titles on higher-powered console platforms (PlayStation 5 is cited as an example). Aonuma indicates that his team worked hard on the object manipulation system, and he hopes that it inspires players to become more creative with problem solving outside of Nintendo's environment: "I would really be happy if our game encourages imaginative thinking in people, and that they could carry that into their real lives."
Aonuma expresses that he is tired after working on the Tears of the Kingdom for a while, but he is happy that fans are enjoying the game - to the tune of 10 million unit sales, three days after the launch date. He seems to be ready for the next challenge - despite his advanced age (60 years old): "Bigger games require a lot of new ideas to fill them up. Any new ideas I might have made into some other IP, I've invested those ideas into the Zelda games." He remains coy when asked about the series timeline - Nintendo has not revealed where Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom sit in the chronology: "I guess I would leave it to the fans and hope they will continue to discuss this among themselves, and I'll be looking forward to see where those discussions lead."
Sources:
Gene Park, Washington Post Interview
The discussion turns to the game's very involved (possibly Havok-derived) physics engine - said to be more complex than examples running within the most expensive AAA titles on higher-powered console platforms (PlayStation 5 is cited as an example). Aonuma indicates that his team worked hard on the object manipulation system, and he hopes that it inspires players to become more creative with problem solving outside of Nintendo's environment: "I would really be happy if our game encourages imaginative thinking in people, and that they could carry that into their real lives."
22 Comments on Nintendo Spent a Year Polishing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
Congrats to the people that still care to make good games
Not like these trash games we get now -- clearly unfinished/unpolished, broken turds publishers rush to release and expect consumers (who are also at fault for continuing to propagate this behavior) to be the beta testers and then issue bloated patch after patch hoping it fixes the numerous issues, when they shouldn't have just delayed the game to begin with if it clearly wasn't up to snuff.
I am so happy there is that huge of a contrast now with a lot of western and eastern games.
Tried Far Cry 6 and after 10min of playing fps falls significantly... to the point that the game is slide show. Few funny things. Changing settings helps to get back fps or just go to main menu and load back into the game. Like what actual ef... and this game came out in 2021... and this particular problem still is not fixed...
Excellent work but I'll play the PC side. (Switch finally broke :( .)
Polishing a game before release, will wonders never cease?