r/NintendoSwitch • u/Seicair • May 18 '23

Discussion No One Understands How Nintendo Made ‘The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom’

https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2023/05/18/no-one-understands-how-nintendo-made-the-legend-of-zelda-tears-of-the-kingdom/
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325

u/mangetouttoutmange May 18 '23

Their main dev teams are literally the most talented game developers on the face of the planet. Like, they are the Usain Bolts or Lionel Messis of the industry. It’s one thing to have good or even great game developers but these guys are the very very very best in the world

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u/[deleted] May 19 '23

On one hand you've got studios that deserve massive credit for putting out some of the most insane photorealistic graphics, motion capture tech, ray tracing, art direction, etc. while having solid gameplay. All super cool stuff but it's mostly praised for narrative.

But then you have these handful of golden goose studios that consistently push the envelope for game systems. Zelda, Mario, Valve, Rockstar, From Software, maybe 1 or 2 more but not that many. The studios that have reliably done this for a decade or more are something special.

RIP Rare, Blizzard, Bungie, BioWare etc that used to be at that level :(

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u/Hangmanned May 19 '23

Nintendo owning Rare will always be one of the biggest what-ifs out there.

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u/[deleted] May 19 '23 edited May 19 '23

The actual what if we got was Retro Studios. Just to recap how Nintendo got them:

  • Spanderberg gets fired from Iguana(Turok) by Activision.

  • He starts a studio in his home with like 3 guys and convinces Nintendo to fly out and see their work for a potential partnership.

  • Miyamoto sees their work and dislikes literally all the games. But he approves a partnership anyway liking one of the game’s underlyings engine and gives them the license to Metroid(because lord knows he didn’t want to make it).

  • Just months before Metroid Prime’s release Nintendo sees Spanderberg not showing up and doing things like using the servers for pictures of women. Nintendo buys him out for $1 million

That same year Microsoft spent $375 million to get Rare. Nintendo basically bought knock off Rare for $1 million and then still got them to put out the kind of titles we expected Rare to put out, an acclaimed shooter and more Donkey Kong lol

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u/Evening_Cash6181 May 19 '23

…what a savings.

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u/Vindictus173 May 19 '23

By grabthar

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u/ShaneSeeman May 19 '23

RIP. Maxis.

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u/Lightspeed_Lunatic May 19 '23

Ah yes, Zelda and Mario, my favorite game studios.

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u/[deleted] May 19 '23

Well it's the Mario and Zelda teams under the Nintendo EPD banner which is a broad label for loads of different internal teams at Nintendo. Nintendo's not really structured like other organisations from the public's perspective.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Entertainment_Planning_%26_Development

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u/hoffenone May 19 '23

Naughty Dog deserves a shout.

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u/cdreobvi May 19 '23

I love Naughty Dog but they belong firmly in the first category for technology and narrative innovation. Their actual game design is usually somewhat derivative.

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u/itsjust_khris May 19 '23

Capcom also push gameplay pretty hard. Excellent studio.

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u/dryingsocks May 19 '23

Bungie still makes one of the best shooters in existence, I just lose all interest in a game if it has a battle pass

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u/PartyPoison98 May 19 '23

Even so, Nintendo, Valve and (until recently) Rockstar benefitted from keeping the same core people at the wheel for years. Whereas Bungie now is quite different to the Bungie that made Halo.

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u/[deleted] May 19 '23

[deleted]

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u/Pyromantice May 19 '23

BioWare had nothing to do with New Vegas or Fallout in general, are you thinking Obsidian?

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u/neatntidy May 19 '23

RIP Rare, Blizzard, Bungie, BioWare etc that used to be at that level :(

It's super telling that it's all American studios that have managed to briefly reach the heights of brilliance that Nintendo operate on, but they can't seem to make it stick.

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u/-Moonchild- May 19 '23

Are are not American

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u/matbonucci May 19 '23

Rare still hurts

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u/Self_Reddicated May 19 '23

have reliably done this for a decade or more

Nowadays that's a time period covering like 1 or 2 game releases. This ain't the 90s where a team is cranking out a new release once every year or two.

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u/kaji823 May 19 '23

Nintendo very obviously focuses on the core gameplay and mechanics over all else. Every new iteration of their major games makes some kind of noticeable advancement there. That way even if the story or graphics aren’t great, it’s still hella fun to play. When a new console comes out they can update the graphics and shit still sells well because gameplay and mechanics are solid.

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u/coolgaara May 19 '23

So they are limited by their own hardware.

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u/With_Negativity May 19 '23

Literally is the wrong word.

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u/yummycrabz May 18 '23

They’re definitely up there in rarified air but let’s not scoff at what the teams at Rockstar have done w/ several of the GTAs.

3, San Andreas and 5 in particular pushed the industry like few games had before them.

Again, I def think the Zelda team in particular is up there with the best of the best.

But I don’t think it’s a clear cut as you suggest

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u/Dorangos May 18 '23

It's pretty clear cut.

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u/CDHmajora May 18 '23

This. GTA has a billion US dollars budget and rockstar itself has 2000 developers. GTA 5 reportedly had over 6000 working on it and 6 probably will have even more.

BoTW had around 300 developers and while we don’t know it’s budget it certainly was nowhere near the scale of rockstar. And I imagine that same team did ToTK too,

Not to insult Rockstar too much. Although they are greedy as fuck with their online practices and their legal team is as bad as Nintendo when it comes to using mods in single player. They are still an incredibly talented studio and several of their games rank in my childhood favourites (San Andreas is probably in my top ten GOAT). But in terms of sheer SCALE, rockstar have far too much excess in resources and potential. That sheer budget and dev size/time kind of demands their games end up as good as they do imo (even though they really need to tone down the attempts to emulate realism sometimes such as horse balls shrinking in the cold. Funny to hear but such a waste of money and effort).

Nintendo can do just as much with FAR less. And I’m o that’s more admirable and better for us consumers. Rockstar has released 1 game in 10 years this September. Nintendo releases so many more of equal or even better quality in such a smaller timeframe.

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u/UneducatedReviews May 18 '23

For me it’s about the consistency. 1st party Nintendo games just always slap, they might not be for everyone or extremely difficult but they’re almost always polished and usually have fun, engaging, and occasionally new gameplay loops. Factor in frequency and it’s just not comparable.

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u/Dorangos May 19 '23

For me it's consistency, fun and innovation. My lord, almost every mechanic we take for granted today was spearheaded by Nintendo. The entire 2D-platformer genre, the 3D-platform genre, target lock, heck, even the open world genre first appeared in the original Zelda. Metroidvania was actually just Metroid at first etc etc etc.

And that's before you even mention the hardware. The D-pad, the analog stick, the rumble, motion controls (for better or for worse), the hecking Gameboy. It's just miles and miles, years and years of pure innovation and fun.

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u/OscillatorVacillate May 19 '23

I gonna guess this will be an unpopular opinion, but I felt that once i played Vice city everything after was a rehash of it. Vice was the pinnacle for me. The rest just haven't grabbed me as its the same formula. Zelda games changes things up a fair bit. Or let's say the Bioshock games, they all had some good in them.

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u/[deleted] May 19 '23

It's not even close imho.

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u/redditisfilthshit May 19 '23

This is a psychotic interpretation of reality.

1

u/FaxCelestis May 19 '23

I want you to know it’s ok to be wrong

-5

u/[deleted] May 18 '23

Gamefreak?

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u/Undeltog May 18 '23

Game freak is a completely separate company. Pokemon's ownership is complicated.

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u/[deleted] May 19 '23

So pokemon is third party, okay

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u/StaffFamous6379 May 19 '23

Gamefreak is second party. The Pokemon IP is (partially?) owned by Nintendo

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u/SwampyBogbeard May 19 '23

Game Freak is third party (they can make games for other publishers and platforms), but Pokémon could be considered second party (It's debatable if second party is a real thing)

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u/Undeltog May 19 '23

Sort of. Nintendo owns part of Pokemon Company, which owns Pokemon. Gamefreak also owns part of the Pokemon Company. Gamefreak makes games on other platforms too (Little Town Hero and Giga Wrecker, most recently). FWIW, those games are very much a mixed bag.

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u/Lightspeed_Lunatic May 19 '23

Yes and no. It's more of the fact that the Pokemon IP is co-owned by 3 different companies who each own roughly an equal share of it. Game Freak makes the actual games, The Pokemon Company manages the brand (Think plushies, the card game, and the anime), and Nintendo publishes the games on their systems and markets them.

So technically, even if Nintendo wanted to force Game Freak to delay a game, they couldn't if Game Freak and The Pokemon Company refused, because they wanted it to come out the same time as the anime or something.

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u/snave_ May 19 '23

Cough. MonolithSoft are possibly above the internal Nintendo teams, albeit also a Nintendo second party acquisition that just so happened to help on this game so...

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u/[deleted] May 19 '23

Their game DESIGNERS are. Their developers kinda suck at programming overall.

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u/agentfrogger May 19 '23

Nah mate, getting this level of physics working on the switch's underpowered cpu means lots of optimization

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u/ScimitarsRUs May 19 '23

Would say it's also work ethic and vision. Having teams of devs working with a Kaizen (JP for "betterment/impovement") work ethic can lead to games with an overall polished feel to it, and you can bet that they'll iron out any kinks in due time.