The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has just introduced two very exciting new abilities for Link. Fuse can put different materials together to create an endless variety of new weapons, and Ultrahand, which Link can use to create more complex combinations. In the trailer, that means things like a simple raft, but we’ve seen things like a car, a hot air balloon, and a primitive helicopter before in other videos.
Initially, I assumed they were items we might discover in the world, their primitive nature suggesting that perhaps some intelligent Bokoblin had cobbled them together, or perhaps some long-lost civilization. But the suggestion that we could make them ourselves, combining elements at will to create whatever we want, reminded me of a very different game.
In early 2020, I stumbled across Scrap Mechanic, a vehicle crafting game in the vein of the indie classic Besiege. You build your vehicle from scratch, adjusting power consumption, suspension, and weight distribution, before using it to complete various challenges. When I arrived at Scrap Mechanic, these challenges had just turned into an open-world survival game, and over time we outfitted our various vehicles to collect and transport resources, with each member of the fleet designed to achieve a different goal, from transporting passengers to transporting wood.
It was a fascinating iterative experience, offering a real sense of ownership of all that we have accomplished. Our crowning glory was an absolute tank, a true power guzzler with built-in hydraulics, storage, and even sleeping quarters that could, in theory, be used to overcome anything the world of Scrap Mechanic can throw at us.
What we were shown in the new Zelda trailer wasn’t that: series producer Eiji Aonuma’s first creation was little more than three stapled logs with an outboard motor in the back. But Scrap Mechanic showed me that in a world as open as Tears of the Kingdom seems, two things are inevitable; First, you have to start somewhere, and while your first creations can be embarrassingly improvised, they’re a success as long as they get you somewhere; Second, if left to its own devices, a community will create amazing things.
We’ve spent years seeing how the Breath of the Wild community lives up to this second point, and it’s clear that Aonuma’s designs are a bit closer to my first point. But even these superficial efforts immediately reminded me of Scrap Mechanic, and while I still have no idea what Tears of the Kingdom actually is areI’m suddenly much more excited.
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