Regardless that The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom constructed off the intensive world map created for its predecessor Breath of the Wild, it wasn’t as a lot of a improvement shortcut as you would possibly suppose. In a GDC discuss on ToTK’s physics and sound programs, Zelda devs have revealed simply how a lot needed to be modified for ToTK because of the introduction of the game-changing Ultrahand.
As coated by Eurogamer, the discuss defined that the Zelda builders went into ToTK desirous to develop on BoTW’s two core ideas: the “huge and seamless Hyrule,” and “multiplicative gameplay”–where physics programs create novel options in-game even the place these options weren’t explicitly designed for.
The enlargement on multiplicative gameplay got here from the introduction of the Ultrahand, which basically modified the sport by permitting gamers to mix objects with nearly countless potentialities. Early within the improvement chain, this unsurprisingly resulted in plenty of chaos, with lead physics engineer Takahiro Takayama relating that he would usually 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 attempting it out.”
The answer to the Ultrahand’s many points got here with a serious change to the Breath of the Wild map the builders have been working with–essentially all non-physics-driven objects within the recreation had to get replaced with physics-driven objects.
This resulted in modifications 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 much more choices for the way the gates might be interacted with, and the way gamers may select to resolve shrine puzzles in ToTK.
“Consequently, no matter what we do, we have now a world free from self-destruction,” Takayama defined. “Gamers can freely specific creativeness and creativity, with out destroying the world.”
