The New Zelda Title Apparently Has A "Game Engine" Link With Splatoon 3

Didn't Ocarina of Time technically run on the Mario 64 engine (albeit heavily modified)?

Kinda makes sense that they basically have one "core" that they just adapt for each game, I'm sure they each have a ton of customizations for their special cases.

I don’t really think it matters. Both games are vastly different but one thing is similar: they both look great.

Why not just reuse the BOTW engine?

Observing laymen discuss game engines without having a basic understanding of what a game engine even means is a guilty pleasure of mine.

Ok and? Unity, for example, is so insanely versatile. A couple of games being made on one engine isn't that big of a deals.

@WiiWouldLikeToPlay probably for the fact that the BOTW engine was originally designed for the Wii U. An engine designed specifically for the Switch will be better optimized.

@Kanbei Oh duh. I always forget about BOTW Wii U.

Well that explains some of the extra development time at least. I assumed it would just be a modified version of the BotW engine.

This happens a lot it sounds like. Dead Space (original) was built off a Tiger Woods game. Reality is just ***** with us behind our backs at every turn.

But that doesn't make sense, this looks like the same engine that ran BoTW on the Wii U. Similarly, Splatoon 3 also seems to use the same engine as its predecessor. Maybe this is simply an iterative engine Nintendo EPD uses for its games?
In that case, I would call it the "Nintendo engine"

And now that we're here, have a nice blast from the past!
https://web.archive.org/web/20121014063739/http://wiiudaily.com/2012/09/wii-u-zelda-game-coming-2014/

Link and Zelda better watch out, the Deep Cut idols could show up to cause a ruckus...

This is BS, they did not create a new engine to run TotK. This is the same engine as BotW, so actually if Splatoon 3 and sports are running any engine it's the BotW engine.

Tears uses FSR1 for resolution upscaling, which was first introduced in Nintendo games on Nintendo Switch Sports,. This engine seems to be quite capable and flexible, e.g. providing flawless 60 fps with Sports and Splatoon. So I have high hopes for 60 fps on Switch 2.

You won’t hear me complaining! Splatoon 3 looks and runs great!

When cornmeal crusthead talks, I listen.

@Max_the_German FSR 1.0 isn't an engine. It's simply an upscaling codec of sorts. There is an algorithm that is used to upscale games. So you could render at game at 480p, use the upscaling algorithm and the output would look very close to 1080p without much hardware resources. Think of it like a reverse video codec. Version 1.0 is software based but Version 2.0 and beyond require hardware to function. But TotK is using the same engine as BotW. So, as I said, Splatoon 3 and sports are using it, not the other way around.

So we can call it SplaTotk.

Monolith Soft back at it again! That’s the link that I see. They worked on parts of Splatoon and TOTK, as well as BOTW and Animal Crossing lol

@WiiWouldLikeToPlay cause it was built on a engine that is well over 7years old now... new engine probably had more flexibiltiy in it and more refined i would guess..

Well, I guess we now know why it took so long from Breath of the Wild to today for Tears of the Kingdom to come out. Whereas we all thought it was using the same game engine as BOTW, turns out it was using a new game engine altogether.

Even though the graphics, sound effects, and gameplay are highly similar, what's under the hood is completely different. They basically needed to build the game from scratch.

@5th313ment Yes, FSR1 is not an engine, but an AMD graphics plug-in. No, FSR2 does not require special hardware Switch doesn’t offer, but it’s very expensive computational-wise, so not a good fit for Switch (it’s even a bad fit for PS4). No, as far as I understand, the engine of Tears differs a lot from that of Breath, it seems to be a completely new developed general-purpose engine which was used first for Sports. Means that not only the code is different, but also the API, i.e. programming the game logic is different.

Someone was surprised a game engine got used in a different game? Or is the surprise that it's the same one Splatoon uses (aka, an actual Switch engine and not Wii U as BotW was)?
Either case isn't surprising at all, and all I have is a glimmer of how these work.

@Bluelink45 You are comparing apples to oranges, here. Unity is versatile because that is its purpose as a general use commercial game engine. It also trades away a tremendous amount of efficiency and performance for that versatility.

Proprietary, focused game engines are quite necessary for Nintendo when it is trying to optimize for performance with an ambitious game on a device as limited as the Switch.

It is a bit surprising to see such very different games sharing the same engine, in this case. The open world of ToTK is so different from the arena style gameplay of S3 and I'd think the biggest focus in ToTK would be the flexible physics engine, while S3 has is much less concerned with that sort of thing.

In the end, with a game this long in production, it is probably quite customized even if it was based on the Splatoon 3 engine.

(As a side note, I can't wait to see how all this experience carries over to the next leap in hardware performance for Nintendo)