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.
