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Prior to launching, Nintendo put a heavy emphasis on the sky aspect of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. It wasn’t until the game actually launched that fans found out about the Depths, and just how massive they were. Surprisingly, even though the Depths are humungous, the dev team managed to piece them together in short fashion.

Famitsu magazine spoke to Nintendo’s Hidemaro Fujibayashi and Eiji Aonuma about the development of Tears of the Kingdom, and in particular they touched on the Depths. According to Fujibayashi, the team only needed a short amount of time to put together a prototype for the Depths, and things quickly progressed after that. Of course, there was still a large amount of fine-tuning and tweaks that needed to happen, but the general idea came together easily.

One area where the team struggled a bit was with the idea of jumping from the Sky and traveling all the way to the bottom of the Depths. Early on in development, the dev team made it possible to jump the skies to below ground, but there were issues with loading along with Link freezing in mid-air. The team said they could fix things up, yet it took to the very end of the game’s development to do away with the issues, resulting in a seamless drop.

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Comments (7)

conangiga

6M ago

Fix things up? Link still froze in midair rather often in my playthrough.


haleman1704

6M ago

@conangiga

But only if you accelerated your fall, right?
At normal speed, there were no hiccups in my playthrough.


I never experienced it, not even when accelerating. But maybey they didn't completely squash te troubles with it and if you're unlucky it still can happen.

Edited 1 time

ngamer01

6M ago

@lucius6

Due to the nature of how BotW and Tears were built, it's quite possible to go faster than what the game allows. This can lead to loading freezes as the game attempts to catch up to you to do the appropriate loading.

There is also a problem of playing BotW/Tears off microSD as you're downloading on Switch. The game will suffer load freezes since microSD bandwidth is being used by Switch's download system. Try not to play BotW/Tears as you're downloading to microSD when playing BotW/Tears from microSD. Let all downloads finish first on Switch.


lucius6

6M ago

@ngamer01

I'm still 90% physical (I even rareley buy a download only game) and I indeed always let finish updates/downloads so that might indeed be why I didn't experience anny propblems.


ngamer01

6M ago

@lucius6

I run physical too, but you can have some game data on microSD even with physical copies. One time I was downloading a Tears update to microSD while I was playing. That caused real bad load times in Tears until the update finished.

Edited 1 time

lucius6

6M ago

@ngamer01

I know that update data doesn't get written to the game card (would allow way easier pirating from the start of a console if that's the case). But I also have never happened that it updated whilst playing. When turning on the Switch it just updates what needs to be update (games wise, system wise it asks first) and I just wait paitently the minute that that usualy only takes. (Yeah, pretty good internet here, I know not everyone has acces to high speed internet)