Who is overly exaggerating? The dozens of developers quoted in that thread?
"Each one of these systems would have been astounding if it was just it by itself. To have it all happening at the same time and all of it to be interconnecting and working and playing nice with each other while the entire Legend of Zelda game, the normal loop that we experience from Breath of the Wild, is just laying right on top, that doesn't seem possible."
As Young points out, the Switch is "notorious for having a very weak CPU" and memory speed that's "incredibly slow compared to modern hardware", so to have all of this going on at once and "behaving predictably" is nothing short of miraculous. "Nintendo's out here making people look like fools on hardware that's literally tenfold what the Switch is," he concludes, "and they're doing things that people thought were impossible on modern hardware."
I'm not sure why you're just quoting stuff that I already read in your thread, but ok.
Did you ... watch the Young video? Pretty much all of it is in context to it seeming impossible for the Switch. He says that it's impressive they layer so much stuff on top of each other, but I never denied it's impressive. The end of his video where he makes the comment on modern hardware is clearly very exaggerated to emphasize how impressive the programming is (he literally ends with "I'm going to be having a lot more sleepless nights" right after saying that). Using the bold code doesn't change that, the video's context is mostly about how impressive it is that they stitched it all together on Switch, and the fact that there are so many gameplay systems (he even talks about how pretty much every one is done in other games...). I just don't agree with the conclusion that he meant that part of the quote literally, it's more like other game devs just didn't try what Nintendo has done.
Josh Scherr is not even a programmer, he's a narrative director / writer who's role was in movies before the games industry and his most extensive credit is being a cinematics lead, which isn't even close to programming.
And again it's weird to use game-dev Twitter to prop up Tears of the Kingdom in comparison to Baldur's Gate. Baldur's Gate was the game where devs literally spent weeks pre-launch worried about how people would have expectations for their games, to the point of them making baseless accusations against Larian. Both games had a similar response on Twitter just with different attitudes.
Edit: Just to be clear, and I don't even feel I should have to specify this because it should be obvious. I'm not saying developers aren't impressed by Tears of the Kingdom. I'm saying that most comments about it being impressive are coming from a game design perspective, or a polished perspective, or from the fact it's able to run on Switch. Not that the kind of game it is was literally impossible until Nintendo made it, which was what was being implied. There's literally a
26 developer quote article from GamesRadar about what developers think makes Tears of the Kingdom special (except one developer that didn't like it). None of their takeaways were that it was impossible, just the same takeaways that most average gamers have - it's polished, it's physics are impressive, and it runs on Switch. The most impressive thing about Tears of the Kingdom is really that someone made a game about bringing all those systems together, not that it was impossible or unthinkable until someone did so.
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