Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was delayed for a year despite development being basically over

Although the gnarliest case in recent years was that of Cyberpunk 2077, it often seems like the video game industry does not learn. As evidence there’s two recent releases: Redfall (a historic setback for Arkane Studios) and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor (for whose performance its developers have had to publicly apologize). The games continue to come out seemingly halfway through development, with all kinds of bugs and technical problems that in the best of cases are addressed through the now classic day one patch. Titles that are delayed to come out well polished are a rare sight, but The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is one of them.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Eiji Aonuma, producer of this game and of the entire series in general, revealed that Tears of the Kingdom was scheduled to be released in March 2022, but they decided to postpone the date “to make sure that everything in the game was 100 percent to our standards”.

A case worth echoing to see if the rest take it as an example. It also reminds us of Final Fantasy XVI, which recently released its first impressions to the wild, while announcing that a demo is coming soon. Hopefully, this installment will come out just as polished as Tears of the Kingdom, since that game’s director, Hiroshi Takai, said last year that they have spent a lot of months polishing and fixing bugs (explaining that they even gave warning not to add new lines of code so that new problems do not appear).

In the rest of the interview Aonuma explains that the February trailer for Tears of the Kingdom there was a lack of enthusiasm from the fans, but explains that it was because “People had not gotten their heads around the gameplay elements or where the fun might be,” and ends by explaining that his hope is for the title to help people rethink how to approach obstacles in and out of the screen.

I would really be happy if our game encourages imaginative thinking in people, and that they could carry that into their real lives.”