‘Development is going to be chaos’ — how physics in Tears of the Kingdom changed everything

“Development is going to be chaos.”

That was the reaction of Takahiro Takayama, lead physics engineer on The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, when he saw the first prototypes for two of the game’s abilities: Ultrahand and Fuse. The seasoned engineer, who led the physics system on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, as well, knew that this type of physics system was uncharted territory.

“The more I thought, the more I worried,” he explained during a panel at 2024’s Game Developers Conference (GDC). This rare peak behind the curtain from the developers at Nintendo reveals just how much of an achievement of design and engineering the unique physics system really is.

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The physics of Zelda

Tears of the Kingdom has received near universal acclaim, and the physics system plays a critical role in that. It’s one of those design elements you usually take for granted — something that exists in the background and rarely comes up during core gameplay. For Tears of the Kingdom, however, physics are everything. And on a quest to deliver a true sandbox for players to let their imagination run wild, physics changed everything.

Why a physics system? For the development team behind Tears of the Kingdom, it all comes down to the concept of “multiplicative gameplay.” Instead of building fun interactions, the team set out to create systems where those interactions would happen naturally. Takuhiro Dohta, who worked on the engine behind Tears of the Kingdom, explained: “Rather than create something fun, create a system that makes fun things happen.”

That was the idea behind both Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. Approaching the second game, the team wanted to enhance the elements the first game established. This early prototyping stage brought about Ultrahand