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, …?
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.