Tears of the Kingdom received a year long delay just to focus on polish

As it turns out, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has been in the making for about a year now, with the rest of that time spent just polishing it up.

In March 2022, Nintendo made the decision to push Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom out of its 2022 release window to spring 2023, where it’s obviously now available (pun not intended). It had always been made clear that 2022 was the target release year for the game, but it wasn’t a guarantee, so the delay wasn’t surprising. Now, according to The Washington Post’s Gene Park, the reason for that delay wasn’t that the game wasn’t technically ready; it was to polish it.

Park recently spoke with Zelda series producer Eiji Aonuma as part of an interview with the washington post, but shared an anecdote that did not make it to the final piece. “Eiji Aonuma said that when he announced a delay for Zelda Tears of the Kingdom in March 2022, the game was nearly complete,” Park shared in a tweet. “The last year he spent his time polishing, making sure the wild physics of the game worked.”

Too often, game delays happen simply because they’re not ready to go, and release dates are set more to please executives than anyone else. They’re also becoming more and more common as games get bigger and bigger, but it was clearly worth it for Nintendo to delay the game for such a long period of time; after all, it is the highest rated game of all time on OpenCritic.

Tears of the Kingdom has also sold incredibly well, racking up over 10 million copies in just three days, surpassing last year’s smash hit Elden Ring and putting it on par with Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, a series that always sells exceptionally well. good.