You know how a lot of us spent a good few months at least last year just building weird, wacky and/or impressive things in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom? Well, during a panel at GDC, some of the fine folks who worked on the game at Nintendo have offered a bit more insight into how the amazing physics system that made all of that possible came to be.
The answer involves flying horses, just in case you need a reason to read on. But yeah, getting back on track, all of this happened well before the game was, according to Nintendo in that lawsuit against the creators of the Yuzu emulator that ended up leading to that emulator no longer being a thing, pirated a million times before it even came out.
“Multiplicative gameplay”. What’s that? Well, it’s Nintendo’s phrase for the philosophy behind both Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, which essentially boils down to letting people mess about with actions and objects to create a bunch of interesting possibilities and scenarios. As outlined in this GDC talk (thanks, IGN), Ultrahand came about as an extension of that idea, letting people slam mutiple objects together like you did when you were an unruly five year old.
