The Legend of Zelda Tears Of The Kingdom has been one of the defining games from Nintendo in recent years, and it proved that the Nintendo Switch is a powerful system when you know how to work within its parameters and push things to the limit. It’s fair to say that no team can do that better than the ones within The Big N itself, as their 2023 GOTY game proved. Yes, it did win Game of the Year at some outlets; not everything is about Baldur’s Gate 3! Anyway, even after a year or so of life, people are still marveling at what the game accomplished.
One of the most important feats by far was its ability to seamlessly let players go from the Sky Realm above Hyrule to Hyrule itself and then to The Depths that were under Hyrule. It’s fair to say that Nintendo isn’t above using load screens when it’s important, and the Switch isn’t the kind of system that can do that kind of seamless transition within every game it has, but for this one, The Big N KNEW it had to do this.
As noted by ComicBook.com, Nintendo was at the Computer Entertainment Development Conference in their home nation and revealed that it took quite a lot of effort to make those seamless transitions happen. Specifically, the ones between Hyrule and The Depths were so taxing on the Switch that it often caused the game to freeze!
So, they came up with a four-step process that would allow them to identify what needed to be loaded on screen, what could have a “lower resolution” and not be noticed by players, slowly loading in things based on what Link himself could see as he went into The Depths, and finally, Nintendo actually figured out a way to tell if players were “likely” to jump into The Depths. If the game had the indication that the players would do so, it would already start loading things up, and that helped speed up the process even more.
Obviously, Tears Of The Kingdom still has loading screens, such as when you go in and out of the shrines, but that’s fair because Link’s going from a massive overworld to a much smaller place on another plane of “existence” if you will.
So, their being able to pull this off in the overworld is incredible. Plus, now they know that they can try this on the Switch 2 when it comes out, as they’ll likely attempt to top what they did with this game in that one.
