When playing Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, you may notice that the game freezes occasionally. Sometimes it only locks up for a second or two, but other times you’ll get a bit of a wait before gameplay continues. We’ll take a look at why this happens and why it’s completely normal.
Why does Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom lock up and freeze?
You’ll notice that Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom occasionally locks up. It typically freezes when you’re gliding down toward land. If you’re a longtime gamer, any freeze is bad news because it usually meant your CD was skipping or there was some kind of technical issue. That’s not the case here, though.
When Tears of the Kingdom freezes momentarily, it’s unloading old data from RAM and getting the next cell of the world ready for you. It occurs most often when you’re flying because the game features unlimited visibility. Sure, there’re fog and Level of Detail that keep the load to a minimum, but if you’re in the sky, you can see a long way. This performance is astonishing considering how outdated the Switch’s hardware is at this point.
When you get closer to the ground, the game has to load in the higher LOD models and textures, which can sometimes cause it to lock up for a second. Usually, you’d see a loading screen appear when this happens, but the Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom developers thought having a seamless transition from sky to ground (and vice-versa) was more important.
