There are so many things being tracked all the time in the game for puzzles and the power arm. Yet despites literally tracking sunshadows for some puzzle completion for example it runs almost smoothly with (in my 170h) no crashes. On a 6 yo portable console??
Botw was already impressive but I could grasp it with the shaders and also there weren’t that much physics puzzle. Objects were more static, there wasn’t the two other maps, enemy diversity was limited, same for weapons. There was less of everything overall but I thought it was the limit of the console and the possible engineering around it.
Is there any resources on how they managed to pull this off? White papers, behind the scenes, charts, …?
Saving and loading the kind of info you’re talking about takes very little time, and very little memory/disk space. Streaming/loading/unloading textures, realistic lighting, complex models, many objects/creatures is what takes a lot of time and often causes stutters in games. BotW/TotK do a lot with very little of this stuff. Maybe not the “many objects” part as their puzzles can get complex, but each object is kept very simple.