The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom celebrates its one-year anniversary today, May 12, 2024. Below we look at how the playful sense of experimentation continues to lead to new discoveries.
There is not a single “chariot sound” file in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. At no point during your travels through Hyrule will you hear a single song intended to mimic the sound of creaking wood moving along a dirt road. That’s because Tears of the Kingdom’s audio system is designed to work just like its complex physics system. Sounds that occur naturally in the world – turning wheels and pounding hooves, for example – come together, as do the wheels and the cart itself. They create a harmonious sound that emerges as you play.
It’s a charming example that highlights what makes pretty much everything within Tears of the Kingdom fantastic. Key elements of the game, from moment-to-moment exploration to the clever physics-based crafting system, encourage player experimentation and offer an amount of freedom that is literally sky-high. For much of their adventure, players make things up as they go.
At first, Tears of the Kingdom may have felt less impressive after its predecessor, Breath of the Wild, inspired awe among players. However, the ingenuity of Tears of the Kingdom’s mechanics shone beyond that first impression and continues to demonstrate just how deep the game’s capabilities are a year after its release. It’s something that even the developers find hard to believe.
“When I first saw the prototype, I thought this was going to be a great game, but I also knew: this was going to be very, very difficult,” said Takahiro Takayama, Tears of the Kingdom’s lead physics engineer, during the Game. Developers Conference in San Francisco earlier this year. “I said to myself: Are we really doing this? The development is going to be chaos. The more I thought about it, the more I worried. I realized that sometimes it’s important to have the courage to move forward.” Takayama then showed a montage of clips of chaotic errors from the early development of Tears of the Kingdom. “As expected, the world fell apart.”
Players have tried to manipulate every aspect of Tears of the Kingdom, whether it’s solving a puzzle, defeating an enemy, or creating something absolutely beautiful.
Take Link’s customizable house near Tarrey Town, for example. Players have the freedom to place parts of the house, including water features, different rooms and stairs, in any way they like. People have created symmetrical masterpieces and modern wonders that seem straight out of contemporary Los Angeles. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Attach a few stone slabs together to create a makeshift dock and suddenly you have a way to create one of Hyrule’s only floating houses. After a bit of building and a lot of use of Ascension, Link’s house will literally sit in the air, giving you an unobstructed view of all that Tarrey Town has to offer.
It’s such a small part of Tears of the Kingdom – all you do with your house is store weapons and horses and take the occasional nap – but players have been experimenting with the entire Zonai device catalog to see what was possible with Link’s whereabouts.
One of the first methods was to use Zonai missiles and levitation stones to shoot Link’s house into the air and then hold it in place by activating the stones. Players discovered that finishing the construction phase of decorating your home left the house hanging in the air.
It goes without saying that experimenting with Zonai devices is at the heart of Tears of the Kingdom, but the structure of the shrine system puts these devices front and center. And players’ urge for experimentation continues to lead to new discoveries. Just a month ago, a player used one of the tricks in the book: when all else fails, blow it up.
Standing on a floating island next to the shrine they must take the gem to, they attach a bomb, a rocket, and a prayer to the gem before using the Ultrahand to right the device. They launched the rocket and activated the bomb’s fuse at the same time, hoping this would change the gem’s trajectory mid-flight. It couldn’t have worked better.
The gem flew up with the rocket before being thrown towards the shrine by the explosion of the bomb. A moment passed before the game automatically transported them to the shrine after the gem landed exactly where it was supposed to be, in front of the shrine entrance. It was one of those moments that only seems possible in Tears of the Kingdom.
“I swear it was my first try,” wrote Redditor Liftingrussian. “I was just curious to see if it would do anything.”
That curiosity is what Nintendo’s game produces so skillfully. Although Tears of the Kingdom has a structured story, the core of the experience is discovering what is possible. Can you create a huge bridge of ice blocks by combining this longsword with a Frost Gleeok Horn? Absolute. Can you glue seven gliders together and still make them fly through the sky? Hard to say, but it’s worth a try.
Nintendo wanted to create multiplicative gameplay with Tears of the Kingdom, which amounts to “sticking two things together to make something new.” No matter what those two things are (or even if they are twelve things) you’ll always find something entertaining that will advance your experience when you experiment with Tears of the Kingdom.
Players found new ways to take down Guardians in Breath of the Wild with awesome trick shots, years after it first launched. We’ll definitely see players coming up with new builds, new discoveries, and most importantly, new experiences, long after this first year of Tears of the Kingdom.