Technical analysis, image quality testing and performance numbers on Nintendo's next big game.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom arrives in a turbulent time for gaming. As new releases continue to debut with a range of technical hiccups, the excitement of diving into a brand-new game has become increasingly muted. Even Nintendo-published titles, such as the recent Pokémon games, have had unfortunate technical flaws.
This is one of the major changes in game design - Breath of the Wild focused exclusively on the lands of Hyrule, but Tears of the Kingdom takes the player up into the sky to explore beautiful floating ruins and below the surface into a subterranean region. The game world remains just as dynamic - wind blows, fire burns, and light bounces - but new features enhance the already gorgeous presentation.
The thing that really makes Tears of the Kingdom and its predecessor so special is the interplay between all these different systems. Just the basics - grass reacts to Link, but Link can also swing his sword to cut it down, in the Zelda tradition. If you build a fire and then light your torch, you can set plants ablaze. And what about those trees? You can run up to them, chop them down, and the resulting log will roll downhill, controlled by the game's physics simulation.
What makes this interesting, however, is how the dynamic resolution manifests itself. In some scenes, for example, the game changes its internal resolution based on the camera's speed. For example, if you rotate the camera in place, you may notice a change in the sharpness of the scene if you look closely. That's because the resolution drops to circa-720p when the camera is in motion but jumps back up to 900p as soon as it stops.
Nearly every instance of major performance loss has been corrected resulting in a game that holds very closely to its 30fps target. The majority of my entire run of capture managed to maintain a solid 30 frames per second in most instances which, for the Switch running a game this vast and emergent, is impressive. It's not 100 percent perfect, however, and I found ways to trigger a drop in frame-rate.
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