Whenever you discuss things like a “Game of the Year” title, people sometimes ignore the struggle to make the game that level of quality and simply focus on the results. Granted, it’s fun playing those results, but sometimes, it takes a LONG period of refinement and testing to make the game great at launch. The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom is the perfect example of that. It came out six years after its predecessor, Breath of the Wild, and aimed to be both familiar and entirely different.
At GDC 2024, Senior Director Takuhiro Dohta, Sound Programmer Junya Osada, and Physics Programmer Takahiro Takayama discussed the various struggles they had in making Tears of the Kingdom, and the humps they had to get over to make the title what they desired. Unsurprisingly, the biggest hurdle was the game’s physics, and the abilities that players had to do basically whatever they wanted with any object they could pick up.
“When I first saw the prototype, I was excited that this was going to be a great game, but this was going to be very, very difficult,” Takayama said, as noted by IGN. “I said to myself, ‘Are we really doing this?'”
Indeed they were, and that led to plenty of “glitchy prototypes” where things didn’t go as expected:
“I would hear things like, ‘It broke! It went flying!’ And I’d respond with, ‘I know! We’ll deal with it later!’”
And that’s what they did! They had to rethink how they handled the physics within the game on a grand scale, but they pulled it off. The game is one of the best-selling titles ever on Switch and won Game of the Year in some outlets. So the struggle was worth it.
