The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom gives players an unprecedented amount of freedom by letting them attach objectives to each other using the Ultrahand, and the process of developing such an intricate system and having it feel polished was no easy task.
During Nintendo's Tears of the Kingdom panel at GDC (thanks, IGN), physics programmer Takahiro Takayama gave a description of the general mood in the studio while the Ultrahand was being developed, and it sounds utterly chaotic. Even before the Ultrahand was in active development, Takayama knew there would be a long road ahead getting it right.
"When I first saw the prototype, I was excited that this was going to be a great game, but this was going to be very, very difficult," Takayama said. "I said to myself, 'Are we really doing this?'"
"I would hear things like, 'It broke! It went flying!' And I'd respond with, 'I know! We'll deal with it later!'" Takayama added.
That sounds a lot like the vibe in my living room when I'm attaching a rocket to a platform while fighting off Bokoblins and it blasts off in the opposite direction of where I'd planned and crashes and sinks into a river.
Per IGN, Takayama added that Nintendo fixed most of the issues it was facing early on with the Ultrahand simply by making literally every object physics-based, which made them simulate the real-world behavior of objects and environments and react to gravity, collisions, friction, and so-forth. But until that point, it sounds like things were pretty wild.
There's a reason Tears of the Kingdom is one of the best Switch games to play today.
