The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Photo credit: Nintendo

6 years ago Nintendo released The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, to seismic fanfare, steamrolling the gaming industry with awards, critical acclaim, and player love. This year its sequel, Tears of the Kingdom, looks certain to repeat this feat. How can lightning strike twice? We’re not game reviewers, but we observe a likely answer: Tears of the Kingdom’s design philosophy is centred solely around human connection. 

But aren’t all games built to connect to the player? Yes, but few embrace human connection quite so genuinely. Many ‘Triple A’ games don’t do this - their design philosophy is more aligned with the functional delivery of products. Things like graphical quality are packaged as component ‘products’ that the player is ‘buying’ when they get the game. Microtransactions and in-game ‘stores’ are more extreme examples of this design philosophy.

Tears of the Kingdom contains functional things found in many games, but it goes so far beyond the delivery of functional experiences. What players and reviewers are calling ‘unparalleled freedom’ is what we call a more authentic human connection. The game endeavours to restrict you as little as possible, to allow players to experiment and try new things even if those things are completely pointless or even outright stupid. In doing so it celebrates the humanity of its players more than the experience it’s trying to deliver them (its ‘product’). 

Tears of the Kingdom’s core experience is the non-transactional, non-functional value of human connection. This is what sets it apart and drives the overwhelming fanfare despite many other games having similar or better functional componentry.

Also the main character is literally called Link, as in a link to the player, which is a pretty obvious clue.