The latest version of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom never ceases to amaze us with the different levels it has been able to present. Whether it is its creative side that has led players to transform the game into an impressive parade of creations, its stunning story that allows players to create their own narrative or the way the game has improved the physics aspects, making it one of the best titles in recent years.
This last point reveals how the developers and engineers at Nintendo managed to the world of Hyrule which we first discovered in Breath of the Wild. Tears of the Kingdom not only brought back the title we already knew, but also presented a world in heaven as well as in its UndergroundThis last part posed problems for the developers and now they have revealed how they solved it.
How Nintendo solved loading times in Tears of the Kingdom
While CEDEC2024 (Computer Entertainment Developers Conference) in Yokohama, Japan, Nintendo gave a talk about the development of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and how they managed to bring this huge 3D world to the Nintendo Switch (via Famitsu). One of the first details that was mentioned was that for this sequel they did not the technical limitations they had for the Wii Uthe console on which Breath of the Wild was released. This gave the developers more freedom with the hardware and Expand the game verticallyOne of the problems they faced was long loading times, especially when entering the depthssomething that according to its developers the game crashed.
To solve this problem, the team implemented Four ideas to improve loading times. First, they used a Profile generator for visualization “in which phase of the underground jump must loading take place”This allowed them to make the loading of certain areas more efficient and to start loading other objects at certain “idle times” when nothing was loading.
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The second idea was “Reduce the number of files to load”This was achieved by setting multiple points of distance between the terrain and the objects to be loaded, giving priority to what was within the player’s line of sight.
The third step was Reduce data size by adjusting texture resolutionespecially those whose appearance does not change significantly when the resolution is reduced. The last step was to Determine in advance when the player was at a “possible waypoint into the underground” to begin loading files. All of these steps resulted in an optimization that made jumps into this area of the map as smooth as possible given the console’s hardware.
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