Eiji Aonuma likes to cheat. “I’m someone who, if I can find a way, likes to do that kind of gameplay,” the longtime Zelda developer told Polygon in an interview ahead of Thursday. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom‘s May 12 release. It’s an ethos from which Link’s new Ascend ability was formed – as a debugging feature that Aonuma and director Hidemaro Fujibayashi used to easily explore the depths of Tears of the Kingdom‘s caves.
“When I was exploring the caves, I got to the destination I was trying to get to, and once I checked it out, I just used the debug code to get to the top,” Fujibayashi told Polygon. “And I thought, Well, maybe this is something that can be useful in the game.”
Aonuma agreed with Fujibayashi that it was a “pain” to go all the way back Tears of the Kingdom‘s labyrinthine caves. “When I heard that, I thought: Oh, I think he would feel the same way I doFujibayashi said. “That’s how we arrived at the implementation of Ascend. To be blunt and fair, cheating can be fun. That’s why we decided to put it there.”
Of course, swimming through ceilings couldn’t just be used as debugging code; it had to be turned into an actual in-game feature. Implementing “cheat-code-like skills” like Ascend in Tears of the Kingdom did cause problems for Nintendo, Aonuma said. “If you give someone the opportunity to just go through a ceiling somewhere, there are all kinds of possibilities to take into account. We need to make sure there are no locations where you go through the roof and find nothing there because of a data loading issue or something like that.”
It can be fine for a developer working on it Tears of the Kingdom to Ascend to a wrong or broken location, but a player cannot Ascend to an empty world.
“While giving people these kinds of cheats is fun, it takes a long time to implement,” Aonuma said. “This is a problem I may have put into the development process myself by enjoying this kind of gameplay.”
Ascend is just one of them Tears of the Kingdom‘s four new skills; the others are Recall, Ultrahand, and Fuse. All four actually feel like cheat codes, things that make the player feel like they’re breaking the game. Ascend, for its part, lets players get to places that would otherwise be far out of reach. Over there Are limitations, though – as Aonuma said, don’t expect to break through just any ceiling.