Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom addresses one of BotW’s most controversial mechanics in the best way possible

There are two very distinct types of people in this world: those that like weapon durability, and those that hate it. It’s the ‘marmite’ of game design choices, and it has formed the basis of endless discourse since time immemorial. Zelda: Breath of the Wild was not like other Zelda games; the title made some massive changes to the core RPG formula that innovated hugely on the series’ personality. Instead of an old man bestowing magical swords on you in some dusty old cave, you needed to forage for your weapons – arm yourself with a branch, if needs be, in order to survive.

But branches – and by extension, anything, apparently – break. Even the Master Sword, once you got your eager hands on it, broke after some use – albeit not permanently. Breath of the Wild became quite a controversial Zelda game to some, because the weapons would break – and break quickly. Even finding yourself some ludicrous, overpowered thing didn’t fill you with that much excitement, because you knew it’d just crumble to dust in about two encounters’ time.

Enter The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, per today’s big gameplay showcase, we know a couple of important new mechanics will be added to the game. First, there’s rewind – a handy way of making falling blocks of stone from the sky retrace their steps and take you back up to the heavens. Next, there’s ascend – a sneaky little move Link can employ to pop his tousled blonde head up a ceiling and into another room.

Lastly, though, there’s fuse: an inventive mechanic that blows the possibilities in this vast fantasy world wide open. Want to make your weapon longer, so you can poke at enemies without getting in range of their dangerous attacks? Fuse a branch to a pitchfork, and stab away in safety. Want to make a keep-away shield to prevent anything from getting too close? Fuse a puffshroom to your buckler, then.

There are exploratory advantages to this mechanic – we’re shown in the trailer embedded above that Link can fuse branches together to form a sort-of raft, neat – but, for me, the killer application here is weaponry. I don’t much care that weapon durability might still be in the game if I can just pick up random bits of enemy gear and environmental debris and kitbash it into something amazing.

Think about it: you’re deep in enemy territory, Link is battered and bruised, and you know your bow only has a few more shots in it before it’s just string and wood and nothing else. But the encampment you just cleared is teeming with low-level gear; shields, swords, flaming sticks. Can you attach three swords to your shield, and ‘turtle’ your way through to whatever waits at the end? Can you affix a flaming stick to the end of a spear, and play ‘keep away’ with whatever horde is deeper in the unexplored dungeon? Even when your resources are limited, your options are open – a combination that made Breath of the Wild so damn good in the first place.

So, how is the combination of fuse and weapon durability going to feel in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, then? I think there’s quite a lot of joy in combing the environment, picking up weapons, and using them until they break. It forces you to be a jack of all trades – know your way around all the different things Link lays his eyes on in the world. Wielding a powerful, ancient sword one minute and desperately improvising with a cheap goblin spear the next? It’s Zelda via Halo – making you observe the battleground and make decisions on-the-fly, a proper power fantasy that really pays off when everything moves in-step with how you’re playing.

Having fuse there, too, makes things even more interesting – could simply taking items off the ground and randomly affixing them to one another address the irritation of having your favourite melee weapon break, mid-encounter? I think so. The devs at Nintendo know how to make these creative mechanics work in modern Zelda – look how, to this day, we’re still seeing people generate new speedrun stats in BotW – and I think this ‘Minecraft-via-the-blacksmith’ idea is the perfect accompaniment for a mechanic as controversial as weapon durability.

Now, as for stamina and endurance… that’s another topic entirely.