Nintendo Spent a Year Polishing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

[T0@st]

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."

View at TechPowerUp Main Site | Source

 

[Bomby569]

i love this game, this is what all games should be like in 2023, the liberty to do things your own way is so insanely fun and works so good
Congrats to the people that still care to make good games

 

[Quitessa]

I particularly like the fact that the game Runs, Is Complete and doesn't Crash every 6 seconds like pretty much every Other AAA game that's come out in the last decade

 

[Gmr_Chick]

People can criticize Nintendo all they want, but at the end of the day, they actually care about the quality of their games. They've always been this way. I remember as a kid in middle school being so excited for Ocarina of Time - Nintendo Power was great for featuring articles about the game's development - and remember all the times it got delayed due to Nintendo wanting it to be as polished as possible. But, boy, was the wait absolutely worth it.

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.

 

[Metroid]

And it was very much worth, the game is incredible, this is what breath of the wild could have been if they had the time to, I'm not saying breath of the wild was a bad game, it was also an incredible game but this v2 is clear what gamers wanted and a step up from the v1. It has almost everything zelda gamers ever wanted in a zelda game dating back all the previous zelda games. If this game was sold on steam then 50 million units sold in 3 days for sure. It would break all records.

 

[Fluffmeister]

I assume this game requires vast amounts of VRAM to be good????

 

[ReallyBigMistake]

I have so much respect for Nintendo for not releasing a broken game and then patching it like so many western devs.
I am so happy there is that huge of a contrast now with a lot of western and eastern games.

 

[Hyderz]

I guess zelda is more important than Pokémon…. Scarlet and violet was a turd to play at launch

 

[eidairaman1]

The Switchs swan song

 

[ixi]

I particularly like the fact that the game Runs, Is Complete and doesn't Crash every 6 seconds like pretty much every Other AAA game that's come out in the last decade

Played aswell for 1.5h, runs smooth as butter on weak nintendo hardware and the game does look good. I was shocked.

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...

 

[Hyderz]

Played aswell for 1.5h, runs smooth as butter on weak nintendo hardware and the game does look good. I was shocked.

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...

ubisoft would be like no we dont have anymore budget and nintendo switch has limited hardware so therefore we no fix but please continue to buy our games

 

[jamexman]

Hogwarts legacy, Jedi Survivor, Redfall etc etc etc devs should learn a thing or two from these guys LOL.

 

[Arkz]

Played aswell for 1.5h, runs smooth as butter on weak nintendo hardware and the game does look good. I was shocked.

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...

Smooth as butter? It's an unsteady 30fps, drops to 20fps all the time, and it looks ok for the hardware but with rubbish texture filtering and no AA. I love the game but lets not kid ourselves.

 

[Bomby569]

Smooth as butter? It's an unsteady 30fps, drops to 20fps all the time, and it looks ok for the hardware but with rubbish texture filtering and no AA. I love the game but lets not kid ourselves.

Maybe he is playing on PC like me. It's a multiplatform game at this point. Don't assume stuff. It's very smooth for me, no stutters. Not a game that needs 144fps anyway.

 

[Arkz]

Maybe he is playing on PC like me. It's a multiplatform game at this point. Don't assume stuff. It's very smooth for me, no stutters. Not a game that needs 144fps anyway.

Don't assume stuff? Maybe learn to read. "runs smooth as butter on weak nintendo hardware"

 

[Vayra86]

Maybe he is playing on PC like me. It's a multiplatform game at this point. Don't assume stuff. It's very smooth for me, no stutters. Not a game that needs 144fps anyway.

Zelda isn't multiplatform at all. You're thinking the convo is about FC6 but its not?

 

[Bomby569]

Zelda isn't multiplatform at all. You're thinking the convo is about FC6 but its not?

there is so many people playing it on PC i don't think we can ignore it now. Even Nintendo isn't ignoring it anymore. And it plays so much better than on the Switch, try it.

 

[Arco]

That's how long you must take to make a game work okay on these dinosaurs.

Excellent work but I'll play the PC side. (Switch finally broke .)

 

[Guwapo77]

I assume this game requires vast amounts of VRAM to be good????

I know this is a joke... But these games on the Switch don't look very good at all - due to VRAM. With that said, doesn't mean this game isn't a freaking masterpiece. I'll be buying this for my Switch in the near future.

 

[ixi]

Smooth as butter? It's an unsteady 30fps, drops to 20fps all the time, and it looks ok for the hardware but with rubbish texture filtering and no AA. I love the game but lets not kid ourselves.

For me it is smooth. I have seen fps drops only when levitating trees through tree leafes and that it is. Anywhere else it is smooth. Of course on that hardware you will have rubbish texture filtering as it have upscaling/downscaling technology and you need to maintane the frame... and if you're gaming on tv then you have tv upscaling as well. And sony kd65xd9305 doesnt go well with nintendo. Sadly it looks garbage comparing to samsung or lg. But it is my fault that in 2017. I bought this model....

 

[thunderingroar]

I assume this game requires vast amounts of VRAM to be good????

Yeah dude, 720p cell shaded PS3 graphics era game doesn't require a lot of memory, shocking.

 

[Fluffmeister]

I know this is a joke... But these games on the Switch don't look very good at all - due to VRAM. With that said, doesn't mean this game isn't a freaking masterpiece. I'll be buying this for my Switch in the near future.

Sadly, it seems not everyone did.... my tongue was firmly in cheek when I posted that, and I'm glad it will vastly outsell on the multi patch trash people like to beta test on the PC.

Polishing a game before release, will wonders never cease?

 

[Vayra86]

there is so many people playing it on PC i don't think we can ignore it now. Even Nintendo isn't ignoring it anymore. And it plays so much better than on the Switch, try it.

Oh, so you mean through emulation?