Eiji Aonuma likes to cheat. “I’m someone who, if I can find a way, loves doing this kind of gameplay,” the longtime Zelda developer told Polygon in an interview Thursday, before The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the KingdomMay 12 release. It’s a philosophy from which Link’s new Ascend ability was formed – as a debugging feature that Aonuma and director Hidemaro Fujibayashi used to easily emerge from the depths of tears of the kingdomthe caves.
“When I was exploring the caves, I would arrive at the destination where I was trying to arrive, and once I checked it, I would just use the debug code to get to the top,” Fujibayashi told Polygon. “And I thought, Well, maybe it’s something that can be usable in the game.”
Aonuma agreed with Fujibayashi that it was a “pain” to go back tears of the kingdomlabyrinthine caves. “When I heard that, I thought, Oh, I guess he would feel the same way I would“, said Fujibayashi. “That’s how we implemented Ascend. To be frank and honest, cheating can be fun. That’s why we decided to drop it there.
Of course, swimming through ceilings couldn’t just be thrown away as debug code; it needed to be made into a proper in-game feature. Implement “cheat code style abilities” like Ascend in tears of the kingdom created problems for Nintendo, Aonuma said. “If you give someone the ability to walk through a ceiling anywhere, there are all kinds of possibilities to consider. We have to make sure that there are no places where you will walk through the ceiling. roof and won’t find anything there because of some data loading problem or something.
This may be suitable for a developer working on tears of the kingdom to climb into a wrong or broken place, but a player cannot climb into an empty world.
“While giving people tricks like this is fun, it takes a long time to implement,” Aonuma said. “It’s a problem that enjoying this type of gameplay myself may have put into the development process.”
Ascend is just one of tears of the kingdomthe four new abilities of; the others are Recall, Ultrahand and Fuse. All four look like cheat codes, things that make the player feel like they’re breaking the game. Ascend, on the other hand, allows players to go to places that might otherwise be out of reach. There are limitations, however – as Aonuma said, don’t expect to break any ceiling.
