There are so many things being tracked all the time in the game for puzzles and the power arm. Yet despites literally tracking sunshadows for some puzzle completion for example it runs almost smoothly with (in my 170h) no crashes. On a 6 yo portable console??
Botw was already impressive but I could grasp it with the shaders and also there weren’t that much physics puzzle. Objects were more static, there wasn’t the two other maps, enemy diversity was limited, same for weapons. There was less of everything overall but I thought it was the limit of the console and the possible engineering around it.
Is there any resources on how they managed to pull this off? White papers, behind the scenes, charts, …?
There’s also a nifty optimization detail that was included originally in Breath of the Wild to deal with memory constraints, and eventually weaved as both a core part of the plot and a balance mechanic: the Red Moon phenomenon, that resets the state of the overworld at regular intervals. The developers originally explained that at the first stages of development, they had to deal with the fact that the game would eventually run out of RAM while tracking the status of every single enemy, so they decided to add a way to clear the slate, and settled for one of the best ways to integrate it in the lore of the game - explaining it to be caused by the malice of Ganon making all the slain creatures go back to life. And in an open-world game with weapon degradation, it’s highly appreciated to have a reliable source of additional weaponry, simply by waiting for the next Red Moon to defeat a few more enemies and take their weapons. I doubt that degradation would have stuck in the game if it weren’t for the Red Moon making the pull-and-push of resource management balanced - without it, there would be a point in the game where Link would have exhausted all available sources of weaponry and be doomed to play the pacifist for potentially the rest of the game.
