Legend of Zelda developer explains how an unexpected item became Tears of the Kingdom's best vehicle-creation tool: "Even we didn't predict that"

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is a rare game that lets players build both their own fun and the wackiest contraptions slumbering in their noggin. Though, even Nintendo developers had no idea that the cooking pot of all things would become such a juggernaut vehicle-construction tool.

Tears of the Kingdom's Ultrahand ability allows Link to glue together most objects in the game, from random rocks to the rarest weapons, in order to create vehicles or other absurd designs. In a GDC 2024 talk, technical director Takuhiro Dohta ran down a few of the especially weird combinations.

The Hylian Shield, for example, is an object familiar to those who've been playing the series at any point over the last four decades, "but I doubt anyone imagined that you'd be able to attach a piece of icy meat to it and [then] use it to surf at high speeds in the latest game," Dohta quipped. 

"This is a sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, so you may have guessed that there would be a portable cooking pot," mainly used for making recipes in both games, "but I doubt anyone predicted that [a] cooking pot would also have excellent suspension," Dohta continued, alongside a clip of four pots glued to a makeshift vehicle's wheels. "Even we didn't predict that."

Dohta explains that these endless possibilities were enabled because the developers wanted players to "combine actions and objects to create many different ways to play." Essentially, the sequel's "multiplicative gameplay" was built to "create a system that makes fun things happen," rather than Nintendo employees stuffing the game with pre-built "fun things." And that's how we get hundreds of Hylian vehicles held together by cooking pots, ancient superglue, and the unbreakable hope that nothing will fall apart. 

Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’s biggest change from Breath of the Wild was made to give players unrestricted freedom in a “world free from self-destruction.”