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, …?
This was indeed the case but not in the way you think it was. Remember that BoTW was developed for the WiiU. The WiiU was substantially less powerful than the Switch.
Nintendo ERD are no strangers to squeezing every last drop of performance for its target platform. They are absolute fucking wizards. BoTW was absolutely mind blowing as a WiiU game in the same vein that ToTK is mind-blowing as a Switch game. They used every possible facet of the target console’s abilities to get the results they did, and every new thing in ToTK is a result of the Devs having better specs to work with.
For example the fact that we weren’t using discs any more meant that the loading from the surface to the Depths could be relatively seamless, as card read speeds eclipse that of Blu Ray.
The boost from 1.5GB to 3GB of operating RAM meant that more things could be added to the world, including more enemy types and the sky islands.
The Switch also gets a considerable boost over the WiiU with regards to CPU and GPU power too, though it isn’t as dramatic. What it really has over the WiiU is access to more complex rendering modes, and these are used to address issues some had in BoTW like draw distance.
BOTW is actually a horrible (or really good…) example of this.
BOTW’s development officially began in 2011. It came out in 2017 for the following console. I don’t remember how well it ran on the wii u, but it ran pretty horribly on the Switch and took a year or two of patches to get a stable framerate (Digital Foundry did a few great videos on this).
But if it were any other dev studio, it would have been nothing but “ugh, lazy devs” and all that stupidity. When the reality is just that optimization is hard (especially if you don’t get a devkit until fairly late in development) and it takes time to make a game run well.
Which… is the reality of how Nintendo or Naughty Dog or any other first/pseudo-first party studio can “squeeze every inch of performance”. It is less that those devs are fundamentally better than any others. It is that they have early access to the hardware and work in an environment where they can actually sit down and talk to the people writing the underlying graphics libraries/drivers for the platform.
youre kinda sideskirting the fact that the open world was only doable, not because of nintendo ERD, but because of Monolith Soft, who had far more experience developing open worlds and pushing a system to its limits than all other internal development studios.
hell on release, Xenoblade Chronicles X was essentially the largest console open world, and gave an optional 20 gigabyte download in order to speed up game loading assets. in a game where its only loading screen was teleporting, going into barracks, or a cutscene.