How Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom speedrunners are breaking the game

Link isn’t that fast, but he can sprint for short periods of time — something that’s determined by a stamina wheel that players can upgrade as they progress in Tears of the Kingdom – The Legend of Zelda. The players can use the Light of Blessing they receive each time to increase their stamina. It’s a smart system that ties Link’s strength to his experience, and one that works for the everyday player. Link’s early constraints fall away as the game moves on.

However, speedrunners don’t play every day. The current record of beating the speedrunner record is a challenge for all. Tears of Kingdom is just over one hour, in a game where it’s easy to clock 100 hours without touching the endgame. Tears of Kingdom lets the player head straight toward the big Ganondorf fight at the end of the game; there’s just a bit of preparation needed. To get through it quickly, speedrunners and the glitch-hunting community are trying to break an “unbreakable” game.

Tears of KingdomThe opposite of The Legend of Zelda Breath of the WildIt’s designed for abuse. The Ascend power was originally a cheat-code used by developers. It’s built into the game’s new abilities, like Ultrahand and weapon fusing, which let the player make ungodly combinations of things; Ascend, which negates ceilings to send Link swimming through stone; and the Recall ability that’s helpful for reversing time and mistakes. Nintendo hasn’t made any real “intended” solution for its puzzles, instead creating a sandbox that allows for experimentation and multiple outcomes. It’s hard to break a game designed around exploits, but the glitch-hunting community has done just that.

No glitches have yet been discovered that are so game-breaking as to eliminate the sky island tutorial or allow the player to take down Ganondorf all in one go. The focus of glitch-hunters has been to find ways to save precious seconds. Tears of Kingdom speedruns. It’s stuff like sprinting without using stamina, which allows Link to travel just a bit quicker, weapon stacking for higher damage, or exploiting Autobuild to fly without building a contraption.

“I know it sounds like, What’s the point of that if it gives him only a little boost?” speedrunner Carl Wernicke, who goes by gymnast86 online, told Polygon. “But over the course of an entire run, all those slight boosts add up to 30 seconds of saved time over the course of an hour-long run.”

Combining those 30 seconds with other measures to save time could be the difference between breaking and not breaking records. Then there’s the fall damage cancellation glitch, which lets speedrunners skip over getting the glider, which saves around six minutes, Wernicke said. In order to pull this off, the player must master a complex input sequence.

Wernicke has a reputation for speedrunning across all Legend of Zelda games. He was the first unofficial record holder for the Any% run — finishing the game’s story without meeting a specific threshold for percentage completed — two hours after Tears of KingdomThe game was released in May, clocking at approximately 90 minutes. In 2013, he began speedrunning The Legend of Zelda. The Legend of Zelda Wind Waker, his focus being 3D Zelda games. He broke records for the next decade with Breath Of The WildA game which has played a significant role in helping us to understand what makes Tears of Kingdom tick.

“It was a pretty safe assumption that Tears of KingdomMechanically, the system was similar to Breath Of The Wild,” Wernicke said. “The sequel takes place in the same world. Aside from the new stuff you can do, we didn’t see huge differences in the mechanics, based on what was shown before the game came out.”

Nintendo You can learn more about this by clicking here.Patched up a number of glitches in the original. Breath Of The WildThe speedruns patch is effective and quick Tears of KingdomThis knowledge has been invaluable to the gaming community in finding exploits quickly. Wernicke explained that there are usually two ways glitch hunters find exploits. The first way is to just stumble upon them by chance while playing the game, and then reverse engineer those glitches. Most commonly, however, glitch hunters combine two or more inputs simultaneously and see what happens.

“There are hundreds of little things you can do in the game,” Wernicke said. “What happens when we combine these things individually to see how the game responds?”

It’s how the community finds things like crouch sprinting or throw sprinting, which lets Link run without losing much stamina, or the Recall launch, a move that uses the Recall ability to launch Link into the air — high enough to reach sky islands.

Image: Nintendo EPD/Nintendo

Blize Online, a glitch-hunter who uses both techniques to expand and reverse-engineer the Recall launch.

“The process involved a lot of testing and trying to shoot down as much variables as possible,” Blize said. Blize studied the glitch that used a Recalled sling to launch Link in the air but found it inconsistent. Blize tweaked the method in order to send Link as high up as possible.

“I started to figure out all the possible factors that could make this glitch work/fail and tried to just change one of those variables at a time,” Blize told Polygon. “Every successful launch I clipped and at the end of play sessions I would skim through [the recordings]It was fun to try and find some patterns. It was a surprise. [a] small comment in a friend’s voice message about one of those clips that gave me the missing puzzle piece.”

Blize spent 10 to 15 of his 50-hour workweek on the process. Tears of KingdomHe worked a little at a moment to refine the variables that he felt confident in. But still, he’s not done: “I still believe there’s a way to make this even more consistent and overall better.”

Discord’s community plays a major role in glitch-hunting and speedrunning. Much of this work takes place in Discord servers, and it is recorded in spreadsheets. It’s a way to make the process easier and more iterative, especially when things are happening so fast. “It’s a very hectic time because the game just came out,” Wernicke said. “New glitches are being discovered every day.” There’s power in numbers, he added.

“Sharing knowledge on how things work is hugely critical for all these different glitches and exploits to be found,” Wernicke said. “And it’s not just glitches and exploits. You know, like, ‘This combat strategy saves two seconds,’ or ‘We can go get this food instead of this food over here, because there’s a better drop rate for this food that we need.”

Glitch hunting is beneficial to the speedrunning community, but it’s also a good thing for the game as a whole, extending the lifespan of an already popular game. The Breath Of The WildCommunity was still discovering new things until Tears of Kingdom’s release, and will probably continue to do so going forward.

“It’s great that communities [form]Themes like speedrunning and glitch-hunting can extend the experience and lifespan of wonderful games. Tears of Kingdom just so much more,” Blize added.