“Are We Really Doing This?” Zelda: TOTK Creators Reveal The Game’s Most Difficult Problem

Some of 's creators have talked about the challenges they faced when developing the game, and how they pulled off the impressive technical feat of making the entire game world physics-driven. Ultimately, such an idea paid off, with Link's Ultrahand ability becoming one of the more entertaining elements of the game, as players could essentially build anything they wanted, with many items ranging from genius to bizarre being shared on social media following the game's launch.

As reported by , Senior Director Takuhiro Dohta, Sound Programmer Junya Osada, and Physics Programmer Takahiro Takayama discussed the work that went into developing such a feature during the panel at the 2024 Game Developer Conference in San Francisco. The developers explained that the philosophy behind both and its predecessor,, is what they referred to as "", where action and objects come together to create countless possibilities.

The team at Nintendo had two main goals: to create an entirely physics-driven world and to create a system where unique interactions happen without any dedicated implementation. This required a lot of experimentation, as things would often break or go flying until Nintendo decided to remove all non-physics-driven items from the game world and replace them with ones that were. A fun by-product of this was the developers accidentally discovering multiple solutions to their own puzzles, rather than the ones they originally intended, a mechanic that players also appreciated upon launch as it gave them more creative freedom to think up their own unique, spontaneous solutions.

Even 's sound design followed a similar structure, with sounds also playing in a system without dedicated implementation to create specific, changing audio for each environment, rather than a set vehicle sound that plays whenever players use them. Instead, sounds would be created by items colliding with one-another, such as wheels on the ground, which changed depending on their size, shape and