Nintendo recently revealed some early test footage showing how the company prototyped The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom's Ultrahand ability. The power allows Link to build and control structures and vehicles and is one of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom's most prominent new features.
Tears of the Kingdom is the upcoming sequel to 2017's Breath of the Wild. Most Zelda games don't directly pick up where the previous game left off. However, Tears of the Kingdom is one of The Legend of Zelda's relatively few direct sequels, alongside games like Link's Awakening and Majora's Mask. The new game picks up a few years after the events of Breath of the Wild and sees Ganondorf return to Hyrule once more. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom also features multiple new mechanics for players to try out once the game launches on May 12.
Nintendo's promotion of Tears of the Kingdom includes releasing several developer Q&As in the lead-up to the game's release. However, it appears that someone on the development team accidentally put one out early, showing a clip of Nintendo's prototyping of the system. The video was spotted by an eagle-eyed Reddit user called Emotional-Ad-1188, who shared a link to the video on the Tears of the Kingdom subreddit.
The video shows Link using Ultrahand to power a pair of player-crafted vehicles. The first is essentially a car consisting of four large gear wheels attached to a stone slab. The video soon cuts to the same car, now fitted with a magical cannon. As it trundles down along the bridge, Link fires the cannon with his Ultrahand, launching a projectile some distance ahead. A second cut takes viewers to the final scene showing Link standing on a crafted boat with two paddle wheels. The clip thus offers a great preview of the vehicle crafting in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.
As Emotional-Ad-1188 pointed out, Nintendo appears to have prototyped Tears of the Kingdom's crafting using Breath of the Wild's Sheikah assets rather than the Zonai technology from the trailers. Viewers can also make out a Sheikah Tower off in the distance of the second scene, and the video still shows the old Wii U interface from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
This led one commenter to wonder if this footage was a holdover from when Tears of the Kingdom was going to be a Breath of the Wild DLC. However, there's no evidence to support that theory, and it's normal for developers to reuse old assets during prototyping. Either way, it's an exciting look at one of the earlier stages of Tears of the Kingdom's development.
The Legends of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom launches for Nintendo Switch on May 12.