Zelda leads were blown away by what Tears of the Kingdom players made with Ultrahand: "It's beyond even the development team's imagination"
Dec. 12, 2023“Oh man, they kind of one-upped me”
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Here’s something forTears of the Kingdom engineersto put on their fridge. Long-time Zelda veterans were mighty impressed with what players cooked up with Ultrahand, with series producer Eiji Aonuma even calling some of them creations of “complexity that I wasn’t able to do during development.”
In a new interview withIGN, Aonuma and director Hidemaro Fujibayashi – who previously directed several other Zelda games – discussed the open-world masterwork with a retrospective eye. Both devs pounced on the community’s Ultrahand tinkering, with Fujibayashi saying: “The first thing is just surprise, it’s beyond even the development team’s imagination of what kinds of things people created.”
Aonuma adds: “When I was in college, one thing I did was work on creating puppets. And these were puppets that functioned by turning a crank of sorts to get them to move. And this was something that when we were working on the Legends of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, I wasn’t able to do… But after the game came out, I saw that, oh my gosh, people created puppets like the ones I made in real life when I was in college, but with more complexity that I wasn’t able to do during development. And so I see that and I’m like, oh man, they kind of one-upped me in that regard.”
Looking at the many viral videos of some of the more complex Tears of the Kingdom creations, Fujibayashi says that “initially I was like, this must be a different game. And then I read through it, I was like, oh, it’s the game we made. And it was certainly a surprise.”
Aonuma singles out a recent Godzilla-inspired mech and wonders how the video, which doesn’t feature Link at all, was even made. “It almost does feel like a different game in that way,” he says. “And I’m still kind of mystified by that.” You’ve gotta wonder how they might feel aboutUltrahand being used as a tool to teach actual engineering students. That and, you know,the Korok-related Geneva Conventions violations.
In the same interview, Aonuma wonderswhy players would want to go back to the “limited” and “restricted” days of pre-Breath of the Wild Zelda games.
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