One The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom player took to social media to share a humorous result of skimping on airplane parts to the point of regret. Their cautionary tale stands in stark contrast to some impressive engineering feats that Tears of the Kingdom players have been sharing since the game's May 12 release.
The latest Zelda game replaces Breath of the Wild's runes with an array of entirely new powers. One of them is Tears of the Kingdom's Ultrahand, which allows players to glue together a wide variety of objects in order to build all kinds of structures and vehicles, including machinery that lets Link take to the skies.
That said, Nintendo imposed some major limitations on Tears of the Kingdom attack drones and other aircraft, which were most recently underlined by a humorous video that went viral on Reddit earlier this week. The brief clip shared by user Lannistark shows their Link attempt to take off in an improvised flying machine with entertainingly disastrous results.
While Lannistark joked about how they regretted skimping on airplane parts in the aftermath of their unsuccessful launch, seasoned Tears of the Kingdom players will probably realize that their takeoff attempt hadn't failed due to engineering shortcuts. Instead, it all went wrong once the central piece of the aircraft disappeared due to a built-in game mechanic that despawns certain vehicle parts after they've been in use for a full minute.
Though the fandom previously speculated that this mechanic could stem from the Switch's technical limitations, a more plausible explanation is that it's a deliberate design choice rooted in Nintendo's desire not to make traversal too easy. Some players have still used Lannistark's humorous video as an opportunity to bemoan the fact that there's no way to remove this crippling time limit on vehicle components during endgame, similar to how unlocking the Autobuild ability in Tears of the Kingdom streamlines the process of iterating on complex machinery.
A portion of the player base seems particularly annoyed with this design choice due to the fact that Energy Cells already impose a fairly effective cap on the amount of time Link can stay airborne. With that battery mechanic already fulfilling the role of a stamina wheel for vehicles, some fans are arguing that despawning individual components after only 60 seconds is redundant, at best, and annoyingly excessive, at worst. Granted, there's still time for Nintendo to address this complaint in a future update or Tears of the Kingdom DLC, assuming post-launch content company's current plans for the game.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is available now on Switch.
