I developed TomTom Navigator back in the early 2000s in a small team, mostly responsible for map storage (TeleAtlas map data) and rendering, route planning, instruction generation and gps map matching. After which I moved on to dynamic storage of map changes (and exchange through the cloud, which we just called a server back then) and dynamic obstructions (traffic jams, closures).

Really it's not hard to see persistence in games is very possible large scale, Minecraft has been doing it for decades and wasn't the first. You don't need much data to store changes, at most 22 bytes for X,Y,Z plus orientation and item ID. In case of Ultrahand contraptions it would be X,Y,Z and orientation for the center point of the object then a binary tree storing the attached items with relative coordinates, orientation and item ID. (Which is easily compressed to use up even less data)

If just storing displaced items, at 22 bytes per item, that's already over 47 thousand items per megabyte before compression. Using a quad tree to efficiently store, retrieve and edit these items doesn't add a lot of overhead. It's just an efficient indexing system to find things quickly based on world position.
The challenging part was calculating routes across Europe within the small memory limit of the device while everything else keeps running. Thus wrote my own memory manager and garbage collection routines to cull dead ends from memory and efficiently reuse that memory. A combination of single linked lists and using fixed size memory blocks that could be exchanged between different parts of the program based on demand.

We had the entire road network, every address, street names, built up areas (buildings), rivers and other land use geographical features, point of interest, stored in less than 2Gb with efficient retrieval back in 2005. Zoom-able from entire Europe/NA down to street level.

I must say it was pretty cool to see the good old TeleAtlas (now TomTom owned) map data back in FS2020 as that uses Bing which uses TomTom maps. Ironically I never use gps navigation myself anymore, I'm so tuned to maps I take a few looks at Google maps when I have to go somewhere and just drive there :) I don't even have smart phone, kinda stepped away from technology. Never make your hobby your work kinda thing.

Anyway to me it's clear, TotK 'sacrificed' persistence over interactivity / physical interactions. Some, maybe most people would prefer that. To me it's just more TwitTok moments as I'm more of a builder expecting things to stay after I build them. With better hardware, it could have done both. Hence the Switch feels dated.

That is not even comparable to what game developers deal with like mate seriously, we're talking huge dynamic worlds that are generating interactions all the way down to physics interacting with tonnes of objects here. 

The error in your theory is that is infinite water too. While theoretically you indeed can start playing a game with the intention of breaking it (I.e. spamming assets to overload the game engine and physics) for a standard player this will never happen. You don't need infinite RAM, you just need enough RAM (and of course a chip and processor that can make use of this RAM) to prevent the game to break its boundaries 

I think maybe you don't get there is absolutely no difference between loading a construction the devs made and loading a construction the players made. Think about Minecraft. The maps are procedurally generated ? So for all intents and purposes, they are built while you are playing and interacting with the world and have a boundaries of a few millions of blocks, I Googled it and it would take 140 days to reach the games boundaries. In a game like Zelda the boundaries os the map, both in area and in height. You only need enough RAM to fill this map with assets. So it's not impossible, let alone impractical 

I disagree with Svenno this is a limitation on Switch, although he can be right. The reason I think it was not done is because the engine was likely not made with this kind of support in mind and reworking the very complex engine only to save the builds would be too troublesome to very few gains. Other possibility is they tried it and saw some routines were starting to get negatively effected by the changed the player could made (imagine building cages towards the placed the minions can spawn)

I think this all discussion is all very pointless tbh, I don't think I agree with either side and I don't think this negatively impact the game to any degree. Sure I would be much more happy building bridges or fixed platforming sections to climb hills faster, but not to a degree of being gaming changing. Maybe if this was a game with tighter level design where you need to solve puzzles in order to traverse the world, in this case I would understand the appeal, but TOTK? Don't think it matters much 

Sorry, you have no idea. Adding real world interactions goes a big step beyond controlled gaming environments. Dynamic you say? Tracking cell phone movement to predict and track traffic jams all over the world, that's dynamic routing. Continuously monitoring vehicle movement and looking for better routes in the background, depending on timed closures, timed restrictions, progression of traffic jams and other parameters. TomTom has grown to employ over 3,800 people who continue developing gps navigation and mapping changes in the world further. A road network is not a static thing...

Not even comparable, thanks for the laugh.

I'm not saying it's not hugely impressive what TotK has accomplished. All I have been saying all along is that the hardware is holding back things that could have made it even better, like world persistence when making changes / adding things.

That's a good point. It does add a lot of extra work for less 'flashy' results. And opens many potentially game breaking possibilities. Hence we also implemented a verification process to user made changes to the road network so a troll couldn't simply add a bunch of one way roads or turn restrictions to block of an entire city from the rest of the world and upload those.

I haven't traversed the world yet, so don't know how useful it could be. But I'm more inclined to get attached to places in games when stuff I do there doesn't reset like nothing ever happened. Interactivity is one big part, yet leaving a mark so to say is another big one. Just like physical beacons / towers you can build in Minecraft to find your way back or survey the land. Build your own sky towers. Which you can, but they will be gone when you wander off.

I don’t believe a lot of what is being discussed regarding persistent worlds and environments would be fixed on a Switch 2. At some point there are absolute limitations to what can be done with a hybrid device and that will always be a fact.

Also a fact is that most Nintendo gamers don’t feel this is a drawback. I don’t feel it is a drawback that what I build doesn’t get saved. It’s not the point of the game and the things I build are just tools to accomplish a specific short term task.

Is there a really cool sandbox future for this game where it does save your builds? Yeah, but it would be a very different, albeit a very fun, game that wouldn’t have such a massive world. TotK: Builder would be a great spinoff. The sky really is the limit with what they have created here and I hope they capitalize on it in unique and surprising ways. I’m definitely hyped for whatever DLC may come.

The laugh comes from thinking it's comparable tbh, for example you are comparing numerous set routes to dynamic interactions. Yes the are many roads that can make up a route and the is some dynamic in the road someone takes in a route but this isn't the same as interactions in the game worlds we are discussing for example your tomtom isn't tracking the physics of every tree and so on while rendering all of Paris and it's people and vehicles it is a different application all together. It's practically apples to oranges. 

The water doesn’t have to be infinite it just has to be enough for example a large water tank isn't infinite but is way bigger than any bathtub, the more complex games become the more you need even more memory and so on this is why in practice it can only be solved with the current solution because the solution on paper would just lead to a never ending chase for more RAM etc...

LOL Only a pre teenager would use we don't care about your opinion line. Any adult would know if you are replying then you care.

This whole fixation with games being "held back by the hardware" is silly, because hardware could always be stronger. It's an endless treadmill.

Every game ever made is "held back by the hardware." PS5 games are held back by not being saved for the PS6, PS6 games are held back by not being on PS7, every console game is held back by not being developed exclusively for high end PCs, and so on and so forth.

The overwhelming focus on moar powah, of always craving more and prettier pixels, at what point does it become an unhelpful mindset, of letting the finer points of technology dictate our enjoyment of our hobby?