
Some elements of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom's art and design processes were automated for efficiency, but Nintendo was careful about offloading too much to computers out of fear of "losing something valuable" to the gameplay experience.
As Automaton reports, Tears of the Kingdom lead QA engineer Takuma Oiso discussed the game's development pipeline at Japan's recent Computer Entertainment Development Conference. Oiso dug into the implementation of the game-altering Ascend ability which lets Link leap through virtually any roof or ceiling, and the way this impacted Tears of the Kingdom's many cave systems.