This, to me, is an incredibly important part of Tears of the Kingdom. While these
gargantuan drops can be sped up as you make your way from the sky down to terra firma,
it’s surprising how rarely I’ve chosen to do that in my hours upon hours of playtime;
choosing instead to just… luxuriate in this video game equivalent of a sensory deprivation tank.
It’s a surprisingly protracted chunk of time I deliberately choose to carve out of my adventure
through Hyrule—allowing me space to reflect on the ridiculous hijinks I’d almost certainly just
experienced, and to really mull over what my next course of action is going to be once my feet hit
the ground. But importantly, for me, this time has felt like an absolute necessity – because at
least initially, when I first started actually wandering Hyrule, on a moment-to-moment basis,
it could feel like Tears of the Kingdom was one of the most overwhelmingly
dense games I’ve played in a long time. It’s not like the environment is necessarily that
much bigger or anything—this is still ostensibly the same Hyrule we adventured through in Breath of
the Wild. It’s just that, thanks to the wealth of new powers and tools available to players,
the very rules of that world feel like they’ve dramatically shifted. With the ability to fuse
almost any item to any weapon, the range of potential combinations and subsequent
buffs in combat is functionally endless—with learning to use these on the fly, efficiently,
sometimes marking the difference between success and an albeit comedic failure.
More generally, almost any object can be bound to any other – a random plank you’d previously
just trip on can now form the basis of an entire bridge or vehicle or whatever
else – a wheel could function as an aircraft if you really wanted it to. Hell, a good chunk of the
ground you stand on is malleable – no longer a barrier, but sometimes actually a lifeline
if you find yourself stuck within four walls. And what’s more, all these powers can compound on
one another—that weird craft can become a weapon in its own right; that pillar a bat. The scope
of possibility imbued in every step taken has truly exploded – it is daunting, and moreover,
it’s gotten me looking at the notion of space in these recent Zelda games pretty differently.
Here’s the short version: if the empty space of Breath of the Wild felt like a response to
other games in its genre, then that same space in Tears of the Kingdom seems more like a functional
necessity, to simply allow players to process the fairly grand new goal Aonuma and team have in mind
with this kind of Zelda game. Let me explain. See, back in 2017, I wrote about how Breath of
the Wild acted as a salve for the saturation of open world design at the time – where
indescribably massive environments, filled to bursting with the same repetitive checklist
ticking exercises, had removed any joy, any purpose from actually exploring these maps.
By showing a bit of restraint in this regard, by laying off the cookie cutter objective markers and
allowing you the space to just exist in this world in relative mechanical silence, across otherwise
barren landscapes, Breath of the Wild made those discoveries, those tangents you would happen upon,
and the crazy adventures that could often result from them, appear all the more distinct,
dynamic and personal. Thanks to the space of Breath of the Wild’s world, exploration
in games was suddenly meaningful again. But there seems to have been a shift of
sorts between that game and its newly released sequel, that I feel is neatly summed up in the
quasi-tutorial areas found in each title’s respective opening. With Breath of the Wild,
you’re getting the basics of controls and climbing, and it feels like you could be
done with the Great Plateau and be paragliding into Hyrule proper within a matter of minutes,
because the tutorial was simply about instilling the joy of relatively unguided exploration,
before loosing you upon a much larger environment to further pursue that joy. It was simple.
Now, in Tears of the Kingdom, though, I spent – no joke – about four or five hours just in
its opening area – so densely packed as it is with those moments where I was thinking “am I
actually meant to be here right now?” There’s a much greater distance between the opening shrines;
massive floating rocks are inaccessible with your current tools; the perilous drops,
the cost of failure seems all the more severe; giant ice walls separating you
from your goal seem fully insurmountable. All of which led to several instances where
I’d spend minutes wondering if this was even possible in my current state… and all of which
made it so much more thrilling when I managed to cobble together some truly janky mess of
a platform or staircase or whatever, that managed to bridge that gap. It legitimately
felt like cheating, that nonetheless the game was abundantly rewarding me for, and it ruled.
And it’s then you start to realise that moreso than just encouraging
exploratory curiosity in players like the last go around, that much grander goal of getting you to
fundamentally examine the rules of this world differently is going to take a lot more time.
And as I finally touched ground after those four hours or so of play, my immediate thought wasn’t
to ride into the majestic vista I’d just been presented with – it was to spend ages jamming
together the daftest weapon combos I could think of; it was awkwardly fiddling with wheels and a
plank to create a vehicle, that I anticipated would be fully undriveable as I was making it.
And so, with all that in mind, the space of this world serves a notably different function
to what it did before. Sure, that sense of calm in wide open spaces still exists,
but you also need those spaces, even hours after the tutorial, to have your curiosity
piqued by a wee rock or something; to spend an inordinate amount of time fiddling about with it,
exploring all its new rules and possibilities and thinking about how you might shift those
rules in your favour down the line. Breath of the Wild’s exploration was
all about those environmental tangents you’d come across in an otherwise empty world—now,
every object, no matter how small or insignificant, can act as that tangent.
The scale of this world, with the addition of sky-based exploration, is daunting enough
as it is—if you didn’t have that open space to experiment, to reflect on what you’d just
done and how it shifted your view of the world, I’d bet that all these new systems would become
so overwhelming as to be neglected by a lot of players—and importantly, in the process,
completely obscuring the point of Tears of the Kingdom as distinct from its predecessor as I see
it – that point being to inspire players to create their own stories, through gameplay and mechanics.
See, those moments in Breath of the Wild where you’d, say, stumble upon a random path up the
side of a mountain in the middle of a desert, were impactful precisely because of the long stretches
of emptiness acting as contrast to this new adventure, but that wasn’t truly your story. At
the end of the day, that path was curated, it was laid out for you – you just chose to go down it.
Those moments in Tears of the Kingdom, however, where it looks like I’m just spending all my time
in an empty field messing with a wheel, might not appear quite as majestic as that previous
scenario—it might seem a bit like missing the vast, gorgeous forest for the oddly wheel-like
trees—but it honestly gave me just as much, if not more joy, when I finally got that rickety
car moving; even if it was just in a straight line across a field that led me directly into
an enemy encampment. That story, that drama, that inadvertent comedy, was all down to me.
It was my narrative whose defining mechanics I was given the space to learn and craft.
And all of this speaks to a desire on the part of the developers to empower all players,
that I honestly really admire – for all that the first game had an immersive sim of sorts ticking
away at its heart, it sometimes felt like the fruits of all those crazy systemic interactions
were limited to only the most dedicated, skilled players, willing to forcibly dig
below the surface of what was presented. I loved that game to pieces, but I never really felt like
I myself reached close to that level with it. But it really seems like this time around,
Aonuma and his team wanted to place that power, that magic in the hands of every player; not only
giving them the tools, but most importantly the space to explore the boundaries of those tools,
to mess with the world on its most fundamental level for as long as is
needed, precisely so that such player-driven storytelling could become truly intuitive.
In short, the space in Tears of the Kingdom is important because it feels like Aonuma’s
team saying “it’s ok. This is a lot to take in, we know, but take your time,
stop and catch your breath every once in a while, and you’ll begin to see the
magic of this world in a whole new way—a magic that few games can come even close to matching.”
--- Thank you all so much for watching—be sure
to hit the like button, subscribe, all that daft YouTube stuff. It really helps the channel, and
it means the world. A massive thanks as well to my patrons who you can see on screen, and are all
getting access to exclusive, fully produced videos that aren’t available here, including another
video on Tears of the Kingdom and nostalgia! Your continued support is what allows me to
keep going with the work I do on this channel in a sustainable way, and I seriously cannot express
how grateful I am for that. You are all the best. Special thanks go to Mark B Writing, Artjom
Vitsjuk, Melmiik, MichaelTrit, Rickety Cricket, Cameron Ceniceros, UrbanCheese, Charles J Liu,
Alasdair Dunn, Vytautas Katarzis, Dolly Bowman, YoungCondor, David Carstens, Tom Webster,
Danas Zukauskas, Jordan Middler, Christopher Faherty, Nicholas Villeneuve, Ruth Knapman,
Yogesh Deshpande, Lea Chinelo, KaeptnKnusprig, Bryce Snyder, CPJMLT LTD, David Bjork,
Timothy Jones, Tommy Carver-Chaplin, Shardfire, Linn Browning, Dallas Kean,
Charlie Kimball and Charlie Yang. And with that, this has been another episode of Writing
on Games. Thank you all so much for watching, stay safe and I will see you all next time.