Aura

my takeaway from all the articles about nintendo's Tears of the Kingdom physics talk at GDC is that they basically rolled their own physics system, yes, but that their real success was in managing to, from a design and structural standpoint, put that physics design at the core of their development goals, such that rather than it having to compromise for the sake of other departments' vision, all departments' goals and tools stemmed directly from the physics system and when the physics was getting in the way the solution was not to stopgap it but to iterate and even add to the physics system until it facilitated that gameplay.

That's like. Really hard to do. I can't overstate how hard it is to do that. It requires not just a really strong top-down vision but a willingness to throw away a lot of traditional game design principles and tricks that would interfere with said physics design in favour of coming up with ideas that facilitate it instead. The amount of testing and iteration and organization that must have gone into this whole thing on an every-department level... my god.

• The building gameplay and its execution is maybe one of the most impressive feats of game development I've ever seen and I'll be actively mad if they throw it away with the next game. I'll be interested to see if anyone even TRIES mimicking this the way everyone did with BOTW's climbing, because the QA load alone is terrifying.
• A larger and more ambitious game than botw in every way, which is shocking, and even more shocking is that it almost entirely works out
• ...Except in the case of the story, which conclusively proves BOTW's minimalism was the right idea; they're not capable of fleshing out a story in an interesting way, even when they've got all the ingredients right there and a fun cast of characters to boot

They've already said they consider this type of game the future of the zelda series and I exit TOTK pretty sold that they can continue to come up with new and interesting ways to work with that, at least in the medium term; I came into this seriously worried I wouldn't be interested in More of BOTW and was proven so conclusively wrong so fast that it's hard not to be impressed, especially coming from a series previously known for its long, slow stagnation.

So yeah. Good game. I'm still, because I am a baby, over here pining for more stuff like Link Between Worlds and Link's Awakening's remake because I feel like I've been consistently let down by many indie attempts at aping the series' 2d entries (and the best ones tend to be the ones that depart from it the most aggressively) but i'm probably just going to have to whine forever because small handhelds no longer exist so no way are those happening anymore