The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom builders had an issue: The land of Hyrule saved falling aside.

Anyone who has performed Tears of the Kingdom would possibly be capable to guess why. Some of the sport’s massive advances—Link’s Ultrahand and Fuse skills, which permit gamers to create any software they’re intelligent sufficient to stay collectively—required a whole lot of new and complicated growth. Nintendo needed to construct one thing larger and higher with its Breath of the Wild sequel, however because the staff labored on the sport, the instruments that might permit gamers to make all these defend skateboards and log bridges broke it. So much. It was, programmer Takahiro Takayama says, “chaos.”

During growth, Takayama would typically hear devs exclaim, “It broke!” or “It went flying,” Takayama stated Wednesday on the Game Developers Conference. “And I would respond, ‘I know. We’ll deal with it later.’”

The drawback was the physics of all of it. “We realized removing all non-physics-driven objects and making everything physics-driven will lead us to the solution we were looking at,” Takayama stated.

The second repair was to create a system that allowed for distinctive interactions between objects, with none particular extra wants. That meant that gamers who needed to make a car, for instance, may tinker with totally different instruments as an alternative of being restricted to one thing primary like a wheel and a board.

All that hardcore programming paid off. Ultrahand and Fuse at the moment are fan-favorite instruments, one thing gamers use to create flamethrowing penises and hacks used in speedruns. No matter how laborious they tried, Hyrule by no means broke.

Those instruments additionally meant gamers may clear up puzzles in a wide range of methods. “Regardless of what the player does, we had a world free from self-destruction,” Takayama stated.