Though 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 growth shortcut as you would possibly suppose. In a GDC speak on ToTK’s physics and sound techniques, Zelda devs have revealed simply how a lot needed to be modified for ToTK due to the introduction of the game-changing Ultrahand.
As coated by Eurogamer, the speak 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 techniques 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 limitless potentialities. Early within the growth chain, this unsurprisingly resulted in loads of chaos, with lead physics engineer Takahiro Takayama relating that he would usually hear his crew exclaiming “it broke!” or “it went flying!” to which he would say “I do know–we’ll cope with it later. Simply deal with getting the gameplay collectively and making an attempt 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 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 modification opened up way more choices for the way the gates may very well be interacted with, and the way gamers may select to unravel shrine puzzles in ToTK.
“Because of this, no matter what we do, we’ve got a world free from self-destruction,” Takayama defined. “Gamers can freely specific creativeness and creativity, with out destroying the world.”