Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom devs on how Ascend began as a debug tool

Eiji Aonuma likes to cheat. “I’m somebody who, if I can find a way, likes to do that kind of gameplay,” the longtime Zelda developer told Polygon in an interview on Thursday, ahead of Tears of the Kingdom: The Legend of Zelda’s May 12 release. It’s an ethos from which Link’s new Ascend ability was formed — as a debug feature that Aonuma and director Hidemaro Fujibayashi used to easily exit the depths of Tears of Kingdom’s caves.

“When I was exploring the caves, I would get to the destination where I was trying to get to, and once I checked it out, I would just use the debug code to get to the top,” Fujibayashi told Polygon. “And I thought, Maybe this can be used in a game.”

Aonuma agreed with Fujibayashi that it was a “pain” to go all the way back through Tears of Kingdom’s labyrinthine caves. “When I heard that, I thought, It seems that he feels the same way as I do.,” Fujibayashi said. “That’s how we got to implementing Ascend. Cheating can be fun, to be honest. So that’s why we decided to drop it in there.”

Of course, swimming through ceilings couldn’t just be tossed in as a debug code; it needed to be transformed into a proper in-game feature. Implementing “cheat-code-style abilities” like Ascend in Tears of Kingdom did create issues for Nintendo, Aonuma said. “If you give someone the ability to just pass through a ceiling anywhere, there are all sorts of possibilities to account for. We need to make sure there aren’t locations where you’ll pass through the roof and find nothing there because of some data-loading issue or something like that.”

This may work for developers working on Tears of Kingdom to Ascend into a wrong or broken location, but a player can’t Ascend into an empty world.

“While giving people cheats like this is fun, it takes a lot of time to implement,” Aonuma said. “This is one issue that enjoying this type of gameplay myself may have put into the development process.”

The Ascend series is not the only one. Tears of Kingdom’s four new abilities; the others are Recall, Ultrahand, and Fuse. All four of them actually feel like cheat codes, things that make the player feel like they’re breaking the game. For its part, Ascend lets you reach places otherwise out of your reach. There You can find out more about this by clicking here. limitations, though — like Aonuma said, don’t expect to get through just any ceiling.