How the team behind Zelda made physics feel like magic

Nintendo's Tears of the Kingdom developers said at the 2024 Game Developers Conference that the game's acclaimed feel came from a deliberate strategy: a physics-driven world built to support "multiplicative gameplay." Technical director Takuhiro Dohta described two guiding principles, "a vast and seamless Hyrule" and multiplicative gameplay, meaning systems that let players combine actions and objects in their own ways. Physics programmer Takahiro Takayama said making every object physics-driven avoided the need for "dedicated implementation," so developers built systems, such as a system for vehicles, instead of individual programs. The article also notes that every speaker had worked at Nintendo for at least 10 years.