How Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom players are breaking an ‘unbreakable’ game

Link is not as fast, but he can sprint for short periods of time – something that is determined by a stamina wheel that players can upgrade as they progress. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Players each time they clear temples receive Blessing of Light, which they can spend on increasing stamina. It’s a smart system that combines Link’s strength with his experience, and that works for the player every day. Link’s initial obstacles are overcome as the game progresses.

But speed runners are not everyday sportsmen. Speedbreakers need to go fast; Current official record for beating tears of the kingdom The game has just over an hour, where it’s easy to watch 100 hours without touching the endgame. tears of the kingdom Lets the player go straight to the big Ganondorf battle at the end of the game; All it takes is a little preparation. To quickly overcome this, the speedrunning and glitching communities are trying to break an “unbreakable” game.

tears of the kingdomAdverse The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Before, it is designed to be exploited; Ascendant ability started out as a cheat code for developers, after all. This built into the game’s new abilities, such as Ultrahand and weapon fusing, which let the player create strange combinations of objects; Ascend, which deflates the ceiling to send Link swimming through the boulders; and the ability to remember which is helpful in reversing time and mistakes. Nintendo has created no real “intended” solutions to its puzzles, instead creating a sandbox that allows for experimentation and multiple outcomes. It’s hard to break a game built around exploits, but the Glitch community has done just that.

None of the glitches the community has found so far are game-breaking enough to negate the opening Sky Island tutorial area, or enable players to defeat Ganondorf in one hit. Instead, glitch hunters focus on finding ways to shave off precious seconds. tears of the kingdom speedruns. It’s stuff like sprinting without using stamina, which allows Link to travel a bit faster, weapon stacks for higher damage, or exploiting autobuilds to fly without any contraptions.

“I know it seems like Oh why would it be so useful if it only gives him a little boost?“Speedrunner Carl Wernick, who goes by Gymnast86 Online, told Play Gamez. “But over the course of the entire run, all those slight increases add up to 30 seconds of time saved during an hour of running.”

Those 30 seconds, combined with other time-saving measures, could mean the difference between breaking the record or not. Then there’s the fall damage cancellation glitch, which prevents speedrunners from getting gliders, which leads to about six minutes of savings, Wernick said. To accomplish this, players must complete a complex input sequence.

Wernick is best known for his fast paced moves in The Legend of Zelda franchise. He was the first unofficial record holder for Any% runs – completing the story of the game without meeting a specific threshold for completion percentage – after two hours. tears of the kingdom was released on 12 May in about 90 minutes. He started speedrunning The Legend of Zelda in 2013 The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, their focus is on 3D Zelda games. They breath of the wilda game that has been key to understanding what makes tears of the kingdom tick.

“It was a pretty safe assumption that tears of the kingdom on a mechanical level, was going to be similar to breath of the wildWernick said. “The sequel takes place in the same world. Other than the new things you can do, we didn’t notice a huge difference in the mechanics based on what was shown before the game came out.

nintendo Is fixed a lot of performance errors breath of the wild speedruns (and patching quickly tears of the kingdom), but that knowledge and expertise has been beneficial to a community that is in a hurry to find new exploits. Wernicke said that there are two common ways Glitch Hunters find exploits: the first is by accidentally finding things while playing regularly, or by finding and reverse-engineering glitches seen in online clips. The most common approach, however, is to combine two or more action inputs at the same time and simply observe what happens.

“There are hundreds of little things you can do in the game,” Wernick said. “What happens when we combine these things differently to see how the game reacts?”

This is how the community found things like Crouch Sprinting or Throw Sprinting, which let Link run without losing too much stamina, or Recall Launch, a move that uses the Recall ability to launch Link into the air – Sky Islands high enough to reach.

Image: Nintendo EPD / Nintendo

A glitch hunter who goes online by Blizz used both methods to reverse-engineer and expand upon the recall launch.

“The process involved a lot of testing and trying to shoot down as many variables as possible,” Blige said. He studied a glitch in using the recalled spear to hurl Link into the air, but found the method inconsistent. Blizz needed to tweak the method to make Link flying as high as possible.

“I started to figure out all the possible factors that could make this glitch work/fail and tried to change those variables one at a time,” Blige explained. “I clip every successful launch and skim at the end of the play session [the recordings] See if I can spot a pattern. in the end it was [a] A little note in a friend’s voice message about one of those clips is what gave me the missing piece of the puzzle.

The process took Blige about 10 to 15 of his 50 hours tears of the kingdom, a few hours at a time, to narrow down the variables of which he was convinced. But even then, he’s not finished: “I still believe there’s a way to make it even more cohesive and better overall.”

The Discord community is a big part of glitch hunting and speedrunning; A lot of the work happens in Discord servers and is documented in spreadsheets. It’s a way to make the process easier and more repeatable, especially when things are happening so fast. “It’s a very busy time because the game just came out,” Wernick said. “New glitches are being discovered every day.” He said that there is strength in numbers.

“Sharing knowledge about how things work is extremely important in order to find all these different glitches and exploits,” Wernicke said. “And it’s not just gimmicks and exploits. You know, like, ‘This coping strategy saves two seconds,’ or ‘We can get this food from here instead of this one, because there’s a better option for this food. The decline rate is what we need.

Glitch hunting is beneficial to the speedrunning community, but it’s also a good thing for the game itself, extending the lifespan of an already popular sport. breath of the wild the community was still discovering new things tears of the kingdomrelease of, and will probably continue to do so going forward.

“It’s great that the community [form] around themes like glitch hunting and speedrunning games because they enhance the lifetime and feel of great games tears of the kingdom Just more,” Blige added.