For those who didn't already know, game designers are cheaters. They cheat constantly when creating games, although you'd never know it just by playing them. To see how designers use visual tricks, we have to turn to modders and content creators who specialize in peeling back the curtain to show how a game is made.
One such content creator is Shesez of Boundary Break. His latest show episode The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and shows the surprisingly simple tricks that Nintendo used to create this blockbuster hit.
For example, one of the earlier cutscenes doesn't actually have Link and Zelda separated at all. When Link sends the broken Master Sword to Zelda, the two are actually right next to each other. Zelda rises from just underground to accept the sword while Link sinks underneath and out of frame. Meanwhile, a particle effect gets stretched out beside the two so that it looks like the Master Sword is magically being transported a vast distance.
Link's new Ascend ability uses an even more extreme camera trick. To the player, it appears as though Link is swimming through a swirling green pattern before he pops up from underground. This gives the impression that Link is moving through solid earth or stone, but in reality, all of Hyrule falls away while Link is transported into a dark green box. Then, when it's time for Link to emerge from whatever he supposedly climbed through, he reappears just underneath the ground. The whole thing looks a lot like a common trick in video games where designers direct players into elevators but the elevator never actually moves. Instead, it is the world around the player that moves.
This trick doesn't happen all the time. If you try to Ascend through a smaller, thinner roof, the green box doesn't appear and Link is just shown to zip upwards and through whatever was above him. Only when you're underground and there's a larger mass ahead of you does the green box appear.
Texture streaming is another interesting trick that Nintendo uses, with much of Hyrule being rendered in low-poly textures as the player runs around Hyrule. Only as the player gets closer to particular objects and places do high-rez textures stream in.
Curiously, Tears of the Kingdom appears to have two "layers" to it: a surface land layer and a water layer just beneath. Shesez showed that just below the surface is an ocean in constant movement--unless you happen to travel to a Shrine. Then the entire overworld disappears as the player is loaded into a zone dedicated to that shrine.
There are lots of other visual tricks used, so check out the video above for more. Tears of the Kingdom is available now only on the Nintendo Switch.