Making Tears of the Kingdom: Inside The Legend of Zelda's finest hour

From the Nordic-inspired wilderness of Skyrim to the untamed frontiers of Red Dead Redemption, the grittily beautiful Continent in The Witcher to the dazzlingly colourful countries of Super Mario Odyssey. When it comes to beautiful playgrounds to explore, the past few decades have spoiled gamers with an embarrassment of riches. 

Arguably few of those game worlds has become quite such a character in its own right as Hyrule, the enigmatic, shifting world of The Legend Of Zelda series. 

Though certain elements remain consistent in most of the series games - the erupting Death Mountain volcano and the ever-evolving Kakariko Town - Hyrule has constantly changed. During the series’ 37 year history Hyrule has morphed from a blocky, top-down map to a living, breathing world where players can climb every mountain, swim every river, and explore every forest. Along the way it has been drowned by a great ocean, inhabited by borrower-size people, and battled denizens of its dark mirror-image reflection.

Hyrule’s zenith arrived in 2017 when players of Nintendo Wii U and freshly launched Switch consoles were thrust into its latest reimagining via Breath Of The Wild. 

“In the games in the series before Breath of the Wild, it was difficult to create a huge seamless world without any load time,” Eiji Aonuma, producer of the Legend Of Zelda series, explains exclusively to the Telegraph. 

That meant previous iterations of Hyrule were divided up into a number of areas. “Each time you would leave or enter one, the data would be loaded. Even if our intention had been to create a huge world, there were impassable walls at the edges.” 

Aonuma likens these older versions of Hyrule to “simply a giant dungeon without a roof where the lines of movement were fixed”. 

He describes the freedom offered to players in navigating Breath Of The Wild as a rebirth, “where each player could make their own experiences”, rather than being led by the nose from one site to the next. 

It was a bold experiment and one which many video-games have stumbled upon over the years. The Xbox-exclusive series, Fable, once promised a rich, intricate world where the player’s every decision would make subtle but noticeable changes to the game world. Ultimately this proved too complicated to realise. The opposite issue which plagued the recent Pokémon Scarlet and Violet where gamers were offered a wide open-world featuring almost nothing worth seeing in it. 

Though it might have been tempting to learn from the failures of other games, Hidemaro Fujibayashi, director of Breath Of The Wild and its sequel, Tears of the Kingdom, is adamant that his team “didn’t create the game with the goal of differentiating it from other open world titles. Rather, I think it’s the case where we made the game we wanted to and this ended up being interpreted by the players as standing out from other games.”

Thankfully, Breath Of The Wild’s Hyrule stuck the landing: enough freedom to offer the feeling of limitless opportunities, and enough detail to make them feel worth it. Almost immediately, the game was lauded with accolades. Thanks to an ‘open-air’ maxim which saw gamers given the chance to go wherever they could imagine, climbing any cliff-face, using a paraglider to float across any ravine, climbing on a raft to ford any river, players could finally feel like the do-anything hero they imagined themselves to be. 

The only problem was that the game proved almost too successful. While previous titles in the Legend Of Zelda series had sold fairly well, Breath Of The Wild’s success was comparatively stratospheric. With a brand new audience hungry for more, Nintendo’s developers were left scratching their heads about how to deliver. 

“Providing new experiences to people who played Breath of the Wild was one of the challenges we identified when we started making Tears Of The Kingdom,” says Fujibayashi. 

The idea they came up with ended up being the biggest feature of Tears Of The Kingdom: a mechanic which allowed players to combine objects and build anything they could imagine with them. A few logs stuck together could become a raft, some planks could form a bridge, add a few wheels to these and you’ve got a car. 

“We thought that this would enable us to create a game where players can enjoy being even more creative than the last game,” Fujibayashi goes on. “As we progressed in the development, we noticed that this gameplay was actually more fun in places and areas you know well, rather than in a place that is brand new. You can imagine new solutions, such as building a bridge to get across a place you had difficulty crossing in the last game. You can only come up with ideas like this if it is a location that you are already familiar with.”

Though it had been a long held ambition of his to create a game where “people could play in a world, after having completed a game in that same world”, it was during the development of Breath Of The Wild’s additional DLC content that the idea to reuse the same game world began to crystallise, explains Aonuma. 

“When we made the DLC for Breath of the Wild, it made me feel that this world still has a lot of potential for new gameplay,” Aonuma explains. “I talked with Mr Fujibayashi about it and he was also thinking about gameplay using the same world as the last game as a base, so we decided to make a sequel set in the same world. Of course, that also presented challenges in terms of making sure it’s not repetitive or feeling like you’ve seen it before.” 

One of the ways the developers achieved this was by deepening the game’s world with new areas. Surface caves and wells offered new places to explore, floating islands in the sky were reintroduced from prequel The Skyward Sword (albeit not quite the same ones, “we did think a little bit about ‘what if we had Skyloft [the setting of that game, beloved by fans] up in the sky…?” chuckles Fujibayashi) and a dark underworld with shades of Jules Verne’s Journey To The Centre Of The Earth was added. Each area was specifically designed to elicit new emotions in the player. 

“Our concept for each of the areas was as follows,” begins Fujibayashi. “For the skies, we wanted players to have an exhilarating and happy experience. In the caves, we wanted players to have an exciting experience of discovery and exploration. In the Depths we have a different ecosystem from up on the surface, and rare items can be found, but we also have the strongest enemies of any area, so players experience tension as they explore a space filled with the unknown.”

Though it was subtle, the whole world was retooled to add ‘creativity’ to ‘freedom’ as the game’s underlying feature. “As it became possible to travel in ways such as creating an airplane-like device and flying through the skies, or creating a horse-drawn vehicle by having a horse pull a large box with wheels attached, there was a need to add new kinds of interesting things you can find while playing, and also change the nature of some of the existing things,” says Fujibayashi. “Some examples of this are placing large geoglyphs that you can only notice when looking down at the surface from above while flying in the skies, or creating characters that ask you to transport many people at once.”

Another new mechanic was the ability to create weapons, potions, food, and gear from the parts of the world around you. “We thought up a system where these places are full of elements that will make your character stronger, so you don’t have to force yourself to do something you’re bad at and can just keep doing the things you enjoy or you’re good at to become more powerful,” says Fujibayashi. 

Players have remarked in some cases on the lack of in-universe explanations for some of the changes to Hyrule. Notably that the Sheikah Towers and Guardians which were a central part of the Breath Of The Wild have disappeared entirely. Nintendo has its own internal explanations about what happened: “They disappeared after the Calamity was defeated (sealed),” Fujibayashi explains. “All of the people of Hyrule also witnessed this, but there is no one who knows the mechanism or reason why they disappeared, and it is considered a mystery. It is believed that since the Calamity disappeared, they also disappeared as their role had been fulfilled. 

“It is, anyway, commonplace for mysterious events and strange phenomena to occur in Hyrule,” he offers, mischievously. “Thus, people have simply assumed the reason behind the disappearance to likely be related to ancient Sheikah technology and it seems there is no one who has tried to explore the matter further. The main civilizations in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are completely different, so we thought about the game based on concepts that match each of these civilizations.” The short answer? Don’t worry about it.

The focus on creativity also added unexpected delights for the developers too. “There’s a part of this game where you can make your own house. It’s a unit construction type house, and I like how the architectural style resembles that of the post-modern style we had a while back,” says Aonuma. “The large unit has one side with a large opening so if you make a three storey house, and have this opening facing the sea, then you can enjoy watching the sun set from there. Like a stereotypical older man, I enjoyed twilight and taking in that view.”

For his part, Fujibayashi is proud to have made a world so rich and vibrant that it is still managing to keep some of its quirkier secrets from players. “I don’t think this is known yet, but if you hold up a Cucco [Zelda’s iconic chickens] and go near a Yiga [evil ninjas who disguise themselves as normal people] in disguise, the Cucco makes a fuss, and you can see through the Yiga’s disguise,” he laughs. 

The developers ultimate hope is that the world they’ve created for Tears Of The Kingdom will continue to astound and delight players into the future, though they’re adamant that it’s on to a new version of Hyrule from this point. “When making Tears of the Kingdom, we were able to implement all of the ideas we had on the development side,” says Aonuma. “I think lots of players will have already completed the main game, but we aren’t creating any DLC this time. We as the development team are hoping you will continue to enjoy this huge land of Hyrule.” 

But if there’s any silver lining to the news that this version of Hyrule is over, at least players can savour the thought that the next time we see the realm’s iconic vistas, they’ll be even more free, more creative, and more wild than before.