How Zelda Devs Fixed TOTK's Broken Physics

Now with fixed audio! Woohoo!

As The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom turns one year old (and because there's nothing better to talk about at the moment), let's look back on the development of the game, and how its incredible physics system came to exist.

While many critics and game developers have praised Tears of the Kingdom for its impressive physics (built upon the Havok engine with a series of in-house tools and libraries), things weren't always this well-designed. The team behind the physics in the game had to strip out all animation-based objects from the game and replace them entirely with objects that worked with the physics system, in order to prevent the game from experiencing some catastrophic bugs and glitches.

Thankfully, because of the lengthy development time for the game, the team were able to perform this task and give TOTK all of the polish it required. Even so, this was a mammoth undertaking that could easily have gone horribly wrong.

It's nice to be back. Apologies for the lack of videos recently, we're trying our best, we promise!

Hope to see you soon!

Lots of love,
Team Video Game Story Time (BretonStripes, Kotor, Little Gamer, Star Wars Boy)

Sources for this video:
https://gdcvault.com/play/1034667/Tun...
https://www.nintendo.com/en-gb/News/2...


Music by Holizna: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/ho...