6 years on from Breath of the Wild, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is finally in the hands of fans. One of the biggest takeaways from the game so far is disbelief in how the console manufacturer was able to run this ambitious title on the woefully underpowered Switch hardware. Speaking in an interview, the game’s producer has now revealed that the team spent over a year polishing the game in order to achieve this result.

Speaking in an interview conducted by TheWashingtonPost, Zelda series producer Eiji Aonuma revealed that Tears of the Kingdom was delayed from its initial 2022 release year to May 2023 in order to “make sure that everything in the game was 100 percent to our standards.”

The year’s delay to focus almost exclusively on polish helps to make sense of not only why the game took so long to come out, but how the game is even able to run on the Switch in the way that it does – with seamless transitions between the Hyrule’s 3 levels of depth.

2023 has not been the best year for games releasing in a polished state, with the likes of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Redfall, The Last of Us Part 1 on PC and Forspoken all launching in a less-than-ideal manner. As such, it is not only welcome, but encouraging to see the likes of Nintendo willing to delay a game by a full year in order to ensure it arrives in a solid state. Hopefully this inspires other studios and publishers to do the same.

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KitGuru says: What do you think of Tears of the Kingdom? Are you surprised by its level of polish? Which other game would have benefited from a year’s worth of polish? Let us know down below.

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