Though it didn’t snag the GOTY at this year’s Game Awards, there’s no doubting that The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is one of 2023’s many gaming highlights. Featuring an intuitive and versatile crafting system, players are free to accomplish tasks in the open-world RPG in wild, unexpected ways. But in a recent interview, Nintendo made it clear that it wanted to encourage, not require, creativity in the game.
Tears Of The Kingdom's Newspaper Questline And The State Of Hyrulean Journalism
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Tears of the Kingdom’s director, Hidemaro Fujibayashi and the game’s producer, Eiji Aonuma were recently asked by Polygon whether TotK’s crafting system would make for a great standalone experience, ala Super Mario Maker. The game’s impressive physics and ability to combine nearly every in-game object together to create tools and problem-solving resources would be a good fit for such an experience. But Aonuma explained that such a thing wouldn’t work with how the team envisioned the role of creative problem solving in the game:
The “opportunity to be creative” is key here. TotK has tons of puzzles and challenges that require creativity to solve them, and some puzzles are initially cryptic enough to invite unconventional approaches. But there’s almost always a more direct path, one that, as Aonuma said, wouldn’t burden players with starting from scratch.
When it first arrived earlier this year, not a week would go by without fans showing off their latest creation in Zelda. It was an impressive display of ingenuity and creative solutions.
Read More: 19 Hilarious Tears of the Kingdom FailsBuy The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: Amazon | Best Buy | GameStop
We saw players do everything from using logs to traverse just about any distance, measuring the in-game weight and physics work , using Link’s time-warping abilities to decimate tough foes, making music, manipulating the game’s physics to soar high into the air, crafting a simple but universally effective “Air Bike,” building the foundations of computers. Sometimes, though, things wouldn’t totally go according to plan.
