You Can't Pet Dogs In Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom, Which Is An Evil Worse Than Ganon
It's impossible to dislike the dogs in "Breath of the Wild" and "Tears of the Kingdom." They're cartoonish, playful, and full of exuberance. Sometimes, these adorable pups even lead Link to small treasures or important areas. Still, there's one thing about "Tears of the Kingdom" that has fans disappointed: Link simply can't pet the dogs.
So those's 10/10's were a striaght up lie then pic.twitter.com/7ftv4a8XMT
— kevin kanawaty (@kanawaty_kevin) May 12, 2023
Some gamers joked that the stunning reviews from critics must have been a lie, because a truly perfect game would allow for dog petting. Others claimed that putting cute dogs in a game and then not allowing players to interact with them was a serious evil that Nintendo should be ashamed of.
Nintendo I can excuse hating your fanbase, but not being able to pet doggos in your game is where I draw the line
— Akakidmaelstrom@eldritch.cafe (@AKAKidMaelstrom) May 12, 2023
Fans want to pet the dog, but considering that "Tears of the Kingdom" has already released, it's unlikely to be patched in anytime soon. In fact, players should have expected the dogs to be off-limits. Though the dogs were definitely good boys in "Breath of the Wild," Link couldn't exactly pet them there, either. It makes sense for the follow-up "Zelda" game to follow the same rules. The lack of a dog-petting feature isn't entirely an oversight on Nintendo's part, though. In fact, there's a good programming reason for the problem.
You couldn't pet the dog in Breath of the Wild, either
In "Breath of the Wild," Link could interact with the adorable pups, sure, running around them and encouraging them to discover treasure, but he couldn't give them a friendly head pat by any means. If Link discarded his melee weapon, players could mime petting the pups, but without any real effect. The director of "Breath of the Wild" clued players in to why the team didn't include a dog-petting mechanic, and the reasoning likely stands true for "Tears of the Kingdom."
In an interview with IGN, producer Eiji Aonuma and director Hidemaro Fujibayashi said that petting the dogs seemed unnecessary in the long run. "In the game it seems like you can do anything, but what it really is are all these interlocking systems where you actually have a pretty limited number of actions that can do a ton of different things," Fujibayashi explained. "So if it came down to something like petting a dog, we would actually have to put in a custom action just for petting a dog that couldn't really be used for anything else."
A separate animation and menu for the sake of petting a dog just didn't make it into "Breath of the Wild," and considering all of the items Link can build with his new abilities in "Tears of the Kingdom," there likely wasn't room for a bit of canine companionship. At least Link can still hang out with the horses he tamed in "Breath of the Wild."