>>44282>>44283Hate to valorize a porky but Nintendo products seemed to get markedly worse after Iwata died, the last company president who had actually worked as a developer. The trajectory has been more toward mainstream trends since around that time.
>>44289>But rebuilding settlements only factors into one side quest and that's it.Yeah and the fact that they had this at all probably means they went through some development process for those mechanics. The side quest is basically 100% scripted rather than using any kind of dedicated mechanics though which makes me think they weren't able to get any of the associated crafting/building mechanics to work. Given that the game got delayed an extra year (supposedly to polish it) I suspect they pivoted late in development toward the zonai devices away from other systems.
Some kind of crafting system was an obvious progression of the systems in BotW. You already have cooking and armor upgrades to build on. You already have crafting materials to work with that drop from sources in the world. And there's also the whole house building side quest followed by the town building one. It also just makes sense in terms of the story to have Link rebuilding Hyrule. They probably had an interest in going that route from the start with TotK especially since they announced it so quickly after BotW's release.
So why not do that? Other games have done similar things with base buliding and TotK does generally have some really technically impressive elements, so it's probably not because the team couldn't manage it. It's probably either due to technical limits of the switch or corporate meddling, or both.
As far as tech limits go, the switch already struggles with the game as is, even having some problems running BotW (most infamously the deku tree area). Even though TotK actually got ported to a whole new engine, there are still going to be limits on what you can run on switch hardware, especially at the scale of these games. It's enough of a feat to be able to handle an open world with persistent terrain and features that you can see from so far away. If there was some game mechanics that allowed you to alter the landscape, that would mean the whole LOD system for rendering simpler things at a distance would have to be implemented to be dynamic and reflect whatever changes you make.
It might seem simple, but it would mean that to run with decent performance they'd need a way to "bake" the terrain and building data in a way that could be readily referenced, only updated when you make changes. It's not something you could ever pre-bake during development simply because of the complexity with the number of settlements and amount of building that happened. And that's assuming each settlement has a pre-determined path for what you can build.
Given the way that the systems
in the game work they probably tried to set up base building to work with custom-made buildings. Picture constructing buildings with the ultra-hand ability and how many variations on that you could have. Imagine how complicated it would be to try to build a system that could dynamically create low poly representations of custom buildings to render at a distance. Or how much additional space it would take for the game to save all your custom builds at each settlement as part of your save file. The ability to build your own house outside Tarry Town is the closest the game gets to this, and it's pretty limited despite only being a single building in one specific area. That might tell us something about how much the switch could actually handle. And consider how much the ultra-hand ability slows down frame rates in the current version of the game. Probably part of the reason they rereleased it for switch 2 was to be able to get a large volume of performance data from players to test if they could do anything like that for a sequel. They have probably abandoned these ideas though, since they are supposedly moving on from the botw/totk world in future Zeldas.
Another possible explanation is corporate meddling, and this seems to have played at least some role in the direction the game took. A lot of people have remarked how out of place the zonai devices feel in terms of the overall design of the game, and my suspicion is that the extra year of development was spent pivoting to that and massively expanding those features to compensate for the lack of base building (which would also mean losing out on other content tied to bases). A common criticism of the zonai devices is how shallow and gimmicky they tend to be, which makes sense for a hasty implementation. They have also been accused of being designed specifically so people can farm clips on short form video sites like tiktok and youtube shorts, which was known to boost interest in BotW. Part of the support for that argument is the short lifetime of some devices as well as the gimmicky nature of building. Lots of people pointed out how there seems to be a direct line from the fast travel bugs in botw (picrel) to the zonai devices in totk being used for traveling.
It's also possibly a combination of both of these reasons (and maybe others). The game was already taking longer than expected based on announcing the start of development so early. Rather than let the devs continue trying to solve what would have been an extremely difficult problem, the execs may have simply decided they better go ahead and get the game ready to release before switch 2, which was announced about 6 months after totk released and itself was released just 2 years later (originally planned for just 1.5 years). If they tried to release simultaneously on both systems that would have cut into sales (considering how many people bought two copies), and if they had to release on both systems they'd still be held back by the switch 1's limits. They probably wouldn't want to gamble on only releasing it on switch 2 as a console seller since it was already announced as a switch 1 title and they already planned to use it as an intermediate step in the price hike from 60 to 80/90 dollars. My guess is it's this combination of factors specifically that cause the game to take the direction it did, because to me it seems very likely they tried the other direction.