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Nintendo's Eiji Aonuma and Hidemaro Fujibayashi revealed the origin story behind one of Link's new abilities.
Over the weekend, fans from around the world had the opportunity to explore the stunning landscapes of the overhauled Hyrule and test out Link's new abilities in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, which has now been officially released.
Among Link's new abilities is the ability to rewind time for objects, create weapons and vehicles from improvised means, and, of course, Ascend, an incredible traversal feature that lets one to "swim" through the ceiling, enabling Link to easily climb mountains and quickly exit the caves by creating self-made shortcuts. Interestingly, Nintendo's Eiji Aonuma and Hidemaro Fujibayashi recently revealed that Ascend has an unusual origin story, and it was possible for this useful feature to not be a part of the final release.
Speaking to Polygon, the developers stated that the ability in question started out as a debug command the developers were using to exit the sprawling caves present in Tears of the Kingdom.
"When I was exploring the caves, I would get to the destination where I was trying to get to, and once I checked it out, I would just use the debug code to get to the top," stated Fujibayashi. "And I thought, Well, maybe this is something that can be usable in the game."
Both Aonuma and Fujibayashi concurred that exiting Tears of the Kingdom's complex cave systems was a tedious and painful experience.
"When I heard that, I thought, Oh, I guess he would feel the same way that I would be feeling," Fujibayashi added. "That’s how we got to implementing Ascend. To be blunt and honest, cheating can be fun. So that’s why we decided to drop it in there."
Implementing the feature, however, was not an easy task, as the developers needed to turn a cheat code into a fully-fledged ability that would always make Link appear in the correct location and wouldn't break the game.
"If you give someone the ability to just pass through a ceiling anywhere, there are all sorts of possibilities to account for. We need to make sure there aren’t locations where you’ll pass through the roof and find nothing there because of some data-loading issue or something like that," commented Aonuma. "While giving people cheats like this is fun, it takes a lot of time to implement. This is one issue that enjoying this type of gameplay myself may have put into the development process."
You can read the full interview here. Also, don't forget to join our 80 Level Talent platform and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.