Game dev blown away by Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom says it "shouldn't be possible on the Switch"

News
By
Published

"Nintendo's out here making people look like fools on hardware that's literally tenfold what the Switch is"

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
(Image credit: Nintendo)

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom launched on Switch earlier this month, and to the surprise of no one, it's an exceptional game. But despite the hype and immense expectation following the success of Breath of the Wild, neither developers nor players were prepared for just how impressive Link's latest adventure was going to be. So good is it, in fact, that according to game developer Lawrence Young it simply "shouldn't be possible on the Switch".

In a TikTok video shared on Twitter by @TheAndyCortez, Young said, "The things that Tears of the Kingdom is doing, it just shouldn't be possible on the Switch. It would be a monumental thing to do on current next-gen consoles, and yet somehow Nintendo has managed to do it on something that amounts to a five year old cellphone."

Among the "things" that Young refers to is Link's Ultrahand ability, which lets you glue practically any objects together, and Recall, a power that allows you to send objects back in the direction they came from by rewinding time. There's also some mighty impressive physics on display, as this shrine puzzle shows, and much more besides.

Latest Videos FromGamesRadar+

"Each one of these systems would have been astounding if it was just it by itself. To have it all happening at the same time and all of it to be interconnecting and working and playing nice with each other while the entire Legend of Zelda game, the normal loop that we experience from Breath of the Wild, is just laying right on top, that doesn't seem possible."

As Young points out, the Switch is "notorious for having a very weak CPU" and memory speed that's "incredibly slow compared to modern hardware", so to have all of this going on at once and "behaving predictably" is nothing short of miraculous. "Nintendo's out here making people look like fools on hardware that's literally tenfold what the Switch is," he concludes, "and they're doing things that people thought were impossible on modern hardware."

All that work has paid off for Nintendo as Tears of the Kingdom sold a staggering 10 million copies worldwide in just three days after launch making it the fastest-selling Zelda game in history.

See what we thought of Link's latest adventure in our Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom review.

Anne-Marie Ostler
Anne-Marie Ostler
Freelance Writer

Originally from Ireland, I moved to the UK in 2014 to pursue a Games Journalism and PR degree at Staffordshire University. Following that, I've freelanced for GamesMaster, Games TM, Official PlayStation Magazine and, more recently, Play and GamesRadar+. My love of gaming sprang from successfully defeating that first Goomba in Super Mario Bros on the NES. These days, PlayStation is my jam. When not gaming or writing, I can usually be found scouring the internet for anything Tomb Raider related to add to my out of control memorabilia collection.

LATEST ARTICLES
  1. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered screenshot
    1
    The Witcher 3 Remastered has "improved combat," which hopefully fixes the 2015 RPG classic's biggest problem
  2. 2
    First Stranger Things: Tales From '85 trailer sees Hawkins enter the paranormal as Eleven and the gang encounter ghostly monsters from the Upside Down
  3. 3
    Coyote Vs. Acme director says it was a challenge to update classic Looney Tunes characters for modern audiences: "We're trying to protect legacies that are so much older than us"
  4. 4
    Coyote Vs. Acme director says the viral support after the movie was scrapped was "kind of a miracle": "It led us to this moment today"
  5. 5
    The Commodore 77 looks like a C64 Ultimate for Edgerunners, but it also "brings a slice of Cyberpunk 2077 and Night City to the long-established C64 demo scene"