One of the greatest masterpieces to be released in 2023 was The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Beyond its open world and its plot, the latest installment of the saga captivated us with its such striking new features in the gameplay. A technology that there is no doubt is one of its fundamental pillars.
That is why we wanted to recognize the merit of the work that its developers have carried out, given that they have won two awards at the GDC Awards 2024 that have been held in the last few hours, such as better innovation and better technology. Without a doubt, it is no wonder if we take into account the number of anecdotes that the game has generated thanks to Link's new powers.
Even so, although technologically speaking it is a true marvel, the team had a really hard time achieving such an excellent result. This has been revealed by its senior director, Takuhiro Dohta, the sound programmer, Junya Osada, and the physics programmer, Takahiro Takayama, who participated in a conference at GDC 2024 to talk about how they created the world of Tears of the Kingdom.
At all times the team's idea was to give life to a world in which physics were fundamental and at the same time players had the ability to interact with objects in totally unique ways. This fact caught Takayama's attention, but he knew that there was a huge job ahead of him.
When I first saw the prototype, I was excited thinking it was going to be a great game, but it was going to be very, very difficult. I said to myself, “Are we really doing this?”
The power of the Ultramano played a determining role in this whole matter, but at the same time it was one of the ones that generated the most problems during the first stages, because it was causing tremendous chaos throughout Hyrule. Takayama himself has let it slip that he kept hearing comments like “it broke” or “it flew away”, which led to the desire to eliminate all non-physical objects and make everything based on physics.
One of the goals they set was to design a system in which very crazy things kept happening, such as making objects move, cause unique interactions, or make noises sound a certain way. We have a good example in vehicles, whose designs can be very different, hence the team had a testing room where they constantly put their effects into practice to ensure that they worked at any time without any problems.
Regarding sound, Osada has stated that the world has voxel information to create a 3D terrain. These are data points that contain information and allow you to determine where they are located, whether on the ground, in water, near a forest, etc. More than anything because the sounds of objects change depending on where they are located.
This is also important because it has been pointed out that the sounds of Tears of the Kingdom they do not have a dedicated implementation and those abstract ones are combined to create completely new ones. To make it clearer how it works, there is no wagon or rowing raft sound, but they are created by the spinning wheels or how they rotate in the water.
In fact, the quality of sounds is constantly modified depending on size, shape and materials that have been used. In the end, all this gives a result that even Osada himself has been shocked on many occasions, going so far as to declare that sometimes he heard some things that he himself did not remember having created.
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