For many, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is still seen as a kind of Breath of the Wild 1.5 – a half-sequel that builds on 2017’s revolutionary hit but, in using the same Hyrule as its overworld, doesn’t fully transform it into something new.
The Zelda developers at Nintendo would probably disagree. In a packed-out talk at GDC last week – which may go down as one of the conference’s great talks of the last few years – technical director Takuhiro Dohta, lead physics engineer Takahiro Takayama, and sound programmer Junya Osada explained the complexity and sheer scale of the task at hand.
The goal, they said, was to take the two central ideas of Breath of the Wild – the notion of a “vast and seamless Hyrule” as one; the other its “multiplicative gameplay”, where physics and chemistry combine to give you new solutions in-game – and expand on them. (As well as, crucially, enabling you to “dig holes,” a much-memed desire of the series’ legendary producer Eiji Aounouma.)
