Game Dev Amazed By How Smoothly Tears Of The Kingdom Runs On Switch; Says “Shouldn’t Be Possible”

Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has taken the world by Storm with its intricately crafted depiction of Hyrule, and all of it was done on the little giant Nintendo Switch. The Switch has been infamous for being a weak portable carried by its vast array of enticing exclusives, but it portrays the latest Zelda title smoothly despite all the physics and visuals behind it. The prospect has caused a game dev to speak out in astonishment on Twitter.

Here's a game dev (@ModestLaw) explaining why Tears of the Kingdom is such a technical achievement. pic.twitter.com/q8arTEBfZf

— Andy Cortez (didn't pay) (@TheAndyCortez) May 21, 2023

Lawrence Young took to Twitter to discuss his sleepless nights due to The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. The dev is dumbfounded by how the title even exists on the five–year–old cellphone-like portable, calling it a technical achievement.

The things that Tears of the Kingdom is doing, it just shouldn’t be possible on the Switch. It would be a monumental thing to do on current next-gen consoles, and yet somehow Nintendo has managed to do it on something that amounts to a five year old cellphone,” says Lawrence Young on Twitter.

The EverQuest Online developer compares the olden Switch to the next-gen consoles; he states Tears of the Kingdom could be considered a technical marvel on current next-gen hardware, and he is flabbergasted by the world of Hyrule Kingdom smoothly running on the little giant.

For instance, he discusses the Link’s Ultrahand ability, which allows him to glue any two objects together to craft effective contraptions. Lawrence also talks about Tears of the Kingdom is always recording to allow users to switch back time in the game, which must be very resource intensive for the Nintendo Switch. Moreover, the Hyrule Kingdom is divided into multiple layers, all accessible at almost any time.

Each one of these systems would have been astounding if it was just it by itself. To have it all happening at the same time and all of it to be interconnecting and working and playing nice with each other while the entire Legend of Zelda game, the normal loop that we experience from Breath of the Wild, is just laying right on top, that doesn’t seem possible.”

Besides occasional stutters due to intensive visuals, the sequel runs smoothly without many technical issues. These features are mostly CPU-intensive, making it a significant miracle for the Switch to run the game smoothly. The portable is notorious for having a weak CPU and is incredibly slow compared to the next-gen consoles. For these features to work in harmony and “behaving predictability” is nothing short of a marvelous feat.

Nintendo’s out here making people look like fools on hardware that’s literally tenfold what the Switch is, and they’re doing things that people thought were impossible on modern hardware.”

Hence, the game dev calls it impossible for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom to exist. While many games have added such features on equal or better hardware in the past, all of them have not been integrated into a game together in such a massive open world. For Nintendo to perform such a feat on an old console is an enormous undertaking. It also explains why the giant company spent a year polishing the sequel to perfection.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was released on May 12 for the Nintendo Switch. It has recently won the Guinness World Record for the fastest-selling Nintendo Game of all time.