The Legend of Zelda series producer Eiji Aonuma has revealed that Tears Of The Kingdom was almost complete before it was delayed last year.
In a recent interview with The Washington Post, Aonuma discussed the latest game in the Zelda franchise and gave a reason for its delay back in March 2022. According to the producer, Tears Of The Kingdom was nearly done, but the team decided to take extra time in order to polish it up.
Aonuma said the move was to “make sure that everything in the game was 100 per cent to our standards”.
Eiji Aonuma said when he announced in March 2022 a delay for Zelda Tears of the Kingdom, the game was pretty much complete.
The last year was spent on polish, making sure the wild physics of the game just work. https://t.co/jb2qlonWsO
— Gene Park (@GenePark) May 21, 2023
Tears Of The Kingdom was initially slated for a 2022 release before it was pushed back during a Nintendo Direct presentation where Aonuma shared the news. A new release date was set for May 12.
The game launched in a good state and hasn’t seen any major technical issues – like game-breaking bugs or performance problems – so it’s clear that the extra time the development team took to polish the game worked out in their favour.
It was also recently announced that the game had sold 10million copies within its first three days of release. A massive milestone not just for Nintendo, but for The Legend of Zelda series, making Tears Of The Kingdom the fastest-selling game in the history of the franchise.
Elsewhere, Aounuma revealed that he’s finished the game 20 times, explaining that he kept playing the game over and over in order to debug it.
“I wonder how many times I’ve played the game to debug it,” Aonuma said. “I’ve played this game from start to finish about 20 times, and I can say that it’s more fun with detours, even more so than in the previous game.”
In other gaming news, Overwatch 2’s long-awaited co-op player vs enemy (PvE) game mode has been scrapped by Blizzard.