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, …?
This was indeed the case but not in the way you think it was. Remember that BoTW was developed for the WiiU. The WiiU was substantially less powerful than the Switch.
Nintendo ERD are no strangers to squeezing every last drop of performance for its target platform. They are absolute fucking wizards. BoTW was absolutely mind blowing as a WiiU game in the same vein that ToTK is mind-blowing as a Switch game. They used every possible facet of the target console’s abilities to get the results they did, and every new thing in ToTK is a result of the Devs having better specs to work with.
For example the fact that we weren’t using discs any more meant that the loading from the surface to the Depths could be relatively seamless, as card read speeds eclipse that of Blu Ray.
The boost from 1.5GB to 3GB of operating RAM meant that more things could be added to the world, including more enemy types and the sky islands.
The Switch also gets a considerable boost over the WiiU with regards to CPU and GPU power too, though it isn’t as dramatic. What it really has over the WiiU is access to more complex rendering modes, and these are used to address issues some had in BoTW like draw distance.