The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: Was postponed by a year, although it was almost finished

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has been out for a little over a week, has been getting great reviews and is on course for record sales. Now it’s becoming public: Actually, the game was basically finished a long time ago, but the makers really didn’t want to leave anything to chance.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was originally planned to be released last year, but Nintendo ultimately decided to postpone the system seller and switch blockbuster by a year to May 2023. Now it is known: Perhaps such a comprehensive shift would not have been necessary, but the decision was made for good reasons.

Gene Park from the Washington Post recently spoke in more detail with Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma in the course of an interview and now reports on an anecdote that didn’t make it into the final interview in the newspaper. When Aonuma officially announced the major postponement of Tears of the Kingdom in March 2022, according to Park, the game was actually “pretty much finished”.

From a technical point of view, a one-year delay would not have been necessary, but Aonuma had good reasons. “The last year has just been spent fine-tuning the game to make sure the game’s wild physics just work,” said Park.

From this point of view, Nintendo has probably done a lot better than other developers these days, even if it meant a hard additional wait for the numerous Zelda fans. Recently, games have often been released in a rather unfinished state, so that numerous patches were necessary to even get them into a reasonably playable form – something that Nintendo probably avoided with this decision.

In just the first three days, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has sold more than 10 million copies – and there have actually been no major complaints and technical shortcomings and errors to date. Maybe you just prefer to wait a little longer for a release in the end…