Nintendo Reveals Tears of the Kingdom's Biggest Problem and How It Was Solved

The best way IMO to see the physics used and explored is the subreddit

https://www.reddit.com/r/HyruleEngineering/

I've been following it for a while and watching as the community has evolved from simple ideas involving efficient travel, built on learning from each other, and progressed to automation and flying battle machines. Try browsing by top of all time to see the popular interesting inventions.

What It is also very impressive in TOTK is just how far you can see. Usually in games there's some fog, or you can see the terrain but it's empty of any game element. In TOTK you can see a fire, a light, or some interesting rock extremely far away and then just go there to find something, it really keeps things immersive.

Here's the GDC talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miARQWGogrc

And an intro to some of the trivial things they patented as part of the game: https://automaton-media.com/en/news/20230808-20590/

Interesting read. Programming is so cool!

I didn't really love the game, but watching YouTube videos of what people have done is incredible.

They put so much work into Breath of the Wild, that I'm glad they were able to recycle a huge amount of that investment into Tears of the Kingdom. Similarly, they put so much work into the physics system that I hope it also gets reused in another game on more capable hardware. If not Zelda, maybe Mario Kart?

Tears of the Kingdom's biggest problem was the lack of a good story or dungeons, which was never solved