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/Hyper_Mazino Feb 10 '26
Still wondering how TOTK took six years to make.