Nintendo invites you to play The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom however you like. It doesn’t present any right or wrong answers for puzzles or combat encounters. The design philosophy is built around providing you with a few tools and limitless possibilities for how to use them. Gameplay is weakest when it takes this freedom away and forces you down a binary path of progression, like temple puzzles or shrines that tear away rampant experimentation in favour of traditional design the series will benefit from leaving behind. In a way, it invites you to break the game.
But it seems we’ve taken it too far, crossing an invisible line, and now Nintendo must subtly snuff out our exploits to avoid any awkward developments. This week saw a sizable update released for Tears of the Kingdom which addresses a few performance issues, quest bugs, and most importantly, a duplication glitch players have been using to abuse the item economy since release.
I haven’t tried the exploit myself, since it sounds a bit too complicated, and I prefer to gather my resources the old-fashioned way. But plenty of my friends have, alongside speedrunners who require specific items in select quantities to maximise their runs. It involves attaching the thing you want duplicated to your arrow while sneakily splicing through menus to trick it into thinking you’re in possession of more items than you actually are.
Quirky things like this have been commonplace in open world games for decades. I remember a similar glitch in The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion that my brother and I used to fill an inn with an endless pile of expensive weapons we could use to collapse the in-game economy. This innocent fun clearly clashes with Nintendo’s idea of what Tears of the Kingdom is meant to be, so it’s been wiped from existence without explanation or even acknowledgement. Fans checked to see if the exploit was still possible when the new patch landed, and quickly found it was not.
Part of me understands that Nintendo wants to eliminate game breaking bugs and glitches, but was this truly one of those? From a technical perspective, especially given it’s brought to life on the Switch of all things, Tears of the Kingdom is a downright triumph. It hasn’t crashed on me once after 120 hours of play, and all of its systems seamlessly blend together with no resistance.
I don’t know how they managed it, or how an innocent duplication trick is going too far. Where is the line, and who does patching this trick out serve beyond Nintendo? Elsewhere, despite Dark Souls and its remaster still having dupe glitches, FromSoftware pulled a similar caper shortly after Bloodborne launched.
The opening area featured a fence which, if jumped on at the exact right angle, made it possible to skip an entire section of the game. As a consequence, many speedrunners now play on the unpatched launch build so this exploit is still present. Only a small percentage of people ever knew about this glitch, let alone cared to make use of it, but it was still patched out for no justifiable reason. We found a way around it eventually, with shortcuts and secrets being discovered even years later. Tears of the Kingdom will be no different, so why cause uproar?
We’ve only scratched the surface of this new adventure, and I’ve no doubt players will figure out an alternative solution to clone their items in the months to come. That, or they’ll brute force a refusal of updates, so their saves remain tied to a previous version. Link’s inventory space is more or less unlimited anyway, and most of your items are only ever used to earn rupees or cook dishes, so what problem is removing this exploit fixing?
Key items such as light blessings and similar consumables can’t be duplicated either, so the harsher examples I can think of that might break the game don’t exist. All this update serves to do is frustrate players while working directly against the freedom Tears of the Kingdom otherwise champions. Now I feel like a trick I could have experimented with has been taken away, and struggle to figure out what would have been so wrong about keeping it around.