 At the time of recording this video, Tears of the Kingdom is 98 days away. Kinda crazy that we're about 3 months away and we still haven't seen more of this game. Now hopefully we have a Nintendo Direct here in the next couple of weeks. We get a blowout, we get to see more of it. And one aspect of the game that I think is going to surprise people the more we get is that this game is going to be more visually impressive, more graphically intense than you might think. I get this general sense in all the videos I've talked about Tears of the Kingdom and all of these social media posts and the conversations on various forums that I've been involved in is that the general presumption is that Tears of the Kingdom is just going to be Breath of the Wild with more content. And there is maybe some critique or some concern that we have right now because we don't know that much about it. But specifically talking about the visuals, everyone just presumes, or I shouldn't say everyone, a lot of people presume that Tears of the Kingdom is visually going to be exactly the same as Breath of the Wild. Now, there is some arguments to be made here. I will say the art style is obviously not going to change. It is a direct sequel. I also don't think the art style has to change. Nintendo sort of found the right balance of realism and yet suspending your belief into a fantasy world without having to go all the way to the hyper-realistic art styles. We have seen not only the Zelda series explored in the past, but many of today's modern AAA games. Essentially, I think Nintendo's art style ages well. I say this as somebody who's currently playing Breath of the Wild in Master Mode and I'm doing it on the Switch OLED and it looks great. There's only really a couple aspects that I feel need to get better, but here's the thing. Tears of the Kingdom is going to end up looking even better. And there's a number of reasons for this. And while I say this, I'm not talking about this in comparison to something like Horizon Forbidden West or God of War, Ragnarok, or even Spider-Man Miles Morales or whatever other AAA game you want to grab from another platform. This is just in comparison to Breath of the Wild. Now, before I dive deeper into this, I want to make sure I shout out a dear friend of the channel, Andres Restart. He made a video on this topic a few days ago and it's doing extremely well for him and some of the points brought up in his video will be brought up here, but I'm going to be adding some additional context and I will note there will be a source in the description to go to his video and I will note certain things that he pointed out. One example is how the draw distance in this game is going to be vastly improved. It's really hard to do one-to-one comparisons right now because we have such little footage, but from what we can tell, it does look like the draw distance is significantly better, not just in terms of the details we can tell from how far away, but also in terms of how the game loads. Breath of the Wild had a very clever way that it would de-load certain aspects and load in lower textures really close to Link and from all the footage we've seen so far, it doesn't look like this game is doing that. Now, a big thing to remember is that this game is built for the ground-up for Nintendo Switch, which is a significantly more powerful and more modern platform than the PowerPC architecture rocking inside the Wii U. So we have to keep this in mind that graphically we were seeing the best of what the Wii U could do with Breath of the Wild, not the Switch. So a big shout out to Andres Restor for noticing that. He also noticed something about the shadows and the lighting in this game, how the shadows in particular are much more dynamic. As an example, when you're holding a torch in Breath of the Wild and a night scene, it doesn't really cast a shadow on the character or objects around you like it should, right? If you're holding a torch or if you've ever been at a bonfire outside at night, you'll know that there's a long casted shadow behind you. And while the shadows aren't exactly one-to-one with reality from what we've seen in Tears of the Kingdom so far, there are shadows being cast. And that is something that is really improved for these torch and fire lit scenes. So that is a big deal. Another thing to talk about, and this is just in general from a technology perspective, is how much better the technology has gotten today. Monolithsoft is helping work on this game, right? Monolithsoft made massive improvements from Xenobreak Chronicles 2 to 3, some of this dealing with temporal AI scaling or anti-aliasing. They found a way to make Xenobreak Chronicles 3 look even better simply by finding a technique that works best on Switch without eating up a lot of processing to smooth out the edges of a game. See, Nintendo hasn't done a lot of anti-aliasing on their games because it is a very process-intensive thing, but they invented a new technology to do this. And because of that, and because they're working with the Zelda team, in fact, they have a team dedicated to working with the Zelda team, I do believe. And we're sort of seeing it on the footage we've seen so far, although we can't say it definitively because we don't have a ton of footage, but it does look like there is some form of anti-aliasing, which is already going to make this look like a much sharper image. It's also notable that so far, all the footage we have seen has been in a native 1080p. We didn't get that in Breath of the Wild. So that is something to note as well that it does look like the game is in a higher resolution, but there are other things as well. Obviously, we couldn't go as high in Breath of the Wild as we can in Tears of the Kingdom, so we never got super close to the clouds, but you could sort of tell that the clouds were baked in to Breath of the Wild when you look at the sky. And clearly, while we're not getting the volumetric clouds and digital foundry thought we did, we are getting some clever graphical techniques with the clouds that make them look much more dynamic and alive in a way that I don't think was even possible back on Wii U. So I already think just the clouds themselves already display the sheer increase in visual fidelity that we're able to get in this game. Now, a lot of other aspects are gonna be really hard to dive into without more footage to really prove a point, but it is worth noting that Tears of the Kingdom already, just doing shot-for-shot comparisons just looks better. There really isn't another way to put it. Tears of the Kingdom from the ground up looks to be a fundamentally better looking experience. Nintendo has so many more modern technologies to play. Tons of patents out there. One thing we didn't even touch on is FSR, right? Fidelity Super Resolution. Fidelity FX Super Resolution to be clear. And Nintendo's already implemented this in multiple of their games. And even strangely, like, did Nintendo Switch Sports really need Fidelity FX Super Resolution? Probably not, but one thing we can say is, damn, does that game look crisp? And they're gonna be using technology like that in Tears of the Kingdom. Technology that didn't even exist when Breath of the Wild came out. So, a long story short, Tears of the Kingdom's gonna end up being a looker. It's gonna end up being a visual feast. This shouldn't really be surprising because at the end or towards the end of every console generation, you tend to see the very best looking games that system can put out. I think we've already seen this a bit at the end of Chronicles 3 and Splatoon 3 and even Bayonetta 3. I know there's some frame rate dips, but there are some visual aspects in that game that look really, really damn good. Fire Emblem Engage looks so much better than Three Houses just from a visual perspective. And I think we're about to see that again. And that's what's interesting is it's not that we're gonna be impressed compared to competitor platforms, but in comparison to itself. I think Tears of the Kingdom is gonna end up being a very, very pretty, a very visually fulfilling game and really show the peak capabilities of when you merge the full breadth of all of the actual processing which can do with modern techniques and technologies that Nintendo has developed behind the scenes. So, take that for what you will, guys. Let me know your thoughts down below and if you feel like Tears of the Kingdom is gonna be a significant step up just from a resolution, just from maybe a consistent frame rate, just from a clarity, a draw distance, shadows, lighting, maybe even other effects that we have yet to see, number of enemies on screen, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. After all, we are in the skies and to be in the skies, you're gonna need a little bit of a different approach because if you can't tell what's 100 feet away from you, that would be a problem because it's hard to make split second decisions when you already jumped off one island to try to get to that other island that's just way off in the distance. Thank you guys so much for tuning in. I am Nathaniel Rumpeljantz and I'll catch you in that next video.