Nintendo Reveals How One of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’s Most Surprising Features Worked

When The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom launched on Nintendo Switch last year, it was proclaimed a technological miracle. The game’s developers pushed Switch to its limits, and players were astounded by the game’s ability to run on the aging console’s hardware. The game’s load times in particular were impressive, with players able to seamlessly jump from the mainland of Hyrule down to the newly added Depths. Pulling this off required some technical trickery on Nintendo’s part, which the company revealed at the Computer Entertainment Development Conference in Japan earlier this month. 

In the early stages of development, loading Link’s jumps from the mainland of Hyrule into the Depths would result in loading times so long, the game would end up freezing. Fixing this issue took four different steps, all of which added up to the final result. The developers started by using a Profiling Tool to figure out which things were taking longest to load, then allocating those load times to sections of the game when nothing else was being loaded. The second step saw the developers come up with a system where objects outside Link’s view weren’t loaded. Third, Nintendo sought out textures where the resolution could be reduced in a way that wasn’t noticeable. 

Those three steps were part of the overall puzzle, but the fourth one is probably the most interesting. Nintendo devised a method where the game could determine ahead of time whether Link was likely to jump into the Depths. So if the player reached a point where it seemed likely, the game would pick that point to start the loading process. All of these combined elements made it so that Nintendo could make jumps seamless! 

While Breath of the Wild is most closely associated with Nintendo Switch, it was also released on Wii U. As Nintendo noted at CEDC, making Tears of the Kingdom exclusively on Switch opened up the possibilities of what the developers could pull off. Clearly, it still took some technical effort, but it’s interesting to see what Nintendo was able to pull off this many years into the system’s lifespan! 

Are you impressed by what Nintendo pulled off in Tears of the Kingdom? Did you enjoy your time with the game? Share your thoughts with me directly on Twitter at @Marcdachamp, on Bluesky at @Marcdachamp, or on Instagram at @Dachampgaming!

[H/T: Famitsu, via Automaton]