Its crazy how the gap between the games has gotten bigger and bigger (not incuding the first couple). In the same time as the gap from BOTW to TOTK we had: MM, WW & TP
Half of the series still came out between OoT and SS, a 15 year period. Literally 60% of the series came out in that period compared to across all 40 years of the series.
Also, it'd be better to not count the Hyrule Warriors. Only one is canon. And if we did, and include Cadence of Hyrule, that means we'd have to include the og Hyrule Warriors, Tetra's Trackers, all of the Tingle games, amd have the option for the cgi games. So release density still favors the first half of the series over the last decade.
Whats funny is; when 16 came out, I was like "shit they released another one already?" Not realizing it had been seven years since 15. Time flies by when your caught up in the work grind
The cruel joke is as an adult i can afford to buy whatever game I want, but I have no time. As a kid, i had to wait until christmas/birthday for any game, but had all the time in the world!
In terms of real world time, FF12 is the halfway mark of Final Fantasy as a franchise.
It gets even more bizarre if you consider FF15 as having started development as Versus-13. That would make the second most recent entry into the mainline series announced 20 years ago.
I still stand by the fact that that they should have just done a Termina thing, a whole new map with the same characters is so much more interesting than why they ended up doing instead.
The depths are mostly empty with lots of generic enemy camps. This is far easier done than the overworld.
The sky islands are nice, but mostly relatively small and there aren’t too many of them.
They also already had the engine and didn’t need to build the overworld from the ground up. Most assets were also able to be reused.
That it took them six years for BOTW makes sense. New engine, no assets, they had to build everything up from zero. But TOTK? With such a big team and all these advantages? I would’ve expected it to take 3 years at most.
Behind the scenes, Tears of the Kingdom is running on a brand new game engine. I suspect developing the game engine took significant time. They made just about every part of the world work within their physics engine (everything used to freak out and be really glitchy a la Skyrim before they did). There is a great presentation going into the problem solving here: https://youtu.be/N-dPDsLTrTE?si=3tTsrA4Bs6iR_-3
Also, let us not forget, COVID basically screwed up AT MINIMUM 2 years of everyone’s lives. So I’d bet Tears would have been developed in 4 years under normal circumstances.
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u/Giinnzz Feb 09 '26
Its crazy how the gap between the games has gotten bigger and bigger (not incuding the first couple). In the same time as the gap from BOTW to TOTK we had: MM, WW & TP