 Before I get into this video, I want to remind you that we have a giveaway going on right now for a Zelda Tears of the Kingdom Nintendo Switch OLED, also a collector's edition of Tears of the Kingdom, and a collector's pin from PAX East. If you want to enter, the link is down in the description and or the pinned comment. Also we'll have some additional giveaways happening during a special 100k plaque presentation live stream later this month, and we're on our road to our next milestone which is 133,000 subscribers, so thank you ahead of time for subscribing, liking the video, and let's get into this graphics comparison. So, Tears of the Kingdom's graphics at initial glance appear to be a pretty significant upgrade over Breath of the Wild, at least to me, and I might have some biased eyes over here because I want them to look better, but it's just something that I have to be honest with you guys. I think the differences are pretty stark. Now, it can be hard to tell, especially in motion because they do use the exact same artistic style, and without an artistic style change or a massive, let's say, resolution bump to 4k, it can be hard for people to notice at initial glance that the visuals are actually better. Now, in this comparison, we're going to focus less on what's different between the games. You know, just in terms of changes to the world, because that's a different type of video, and that's something many people have already done, including some of what you're seeing on screen right now in a final trailer map comparison video, which was done by RMFH. You really should go watch his full five-minute video on this that shows off a bunch of locations with explanations of all the differences, and there's many others out there comparing other gameplay and other segments from other trailers to Breath of the Wild as well for those that want to just see what all the differences really are in terms of what's changed. Now, first, I need to note, one thing about trying to compare tears of the kingdom of the breath of the wild is that compression is a real thing on all of the footage. We don't just say this to say this. To give you an example, look at this. On the left is a still image taken from the full 1080p trailer on YouTube, or I should say the 1080p gameplay. On the right is a screenshot provided by Nintendo of this exact same section on their press website. You can see a ton of compression at play, but if that's not good enough, let's zoom in on the background island texture. You can clearly see the right is clearer than the left. This matters because as things are blurrier in the footage than what they will be when we play them on our TVs or on our switch screens, it can make the crisp, clean looks that we can get out of Breath of the Wild today, thanks to direct capture, much better in many instances, simply because we aren't reliant on YouTube compression to make these comparisons. And the crazy thing is you're watching a YouTube video right now, so it's already compressed on top of that, and you can still tell the differences. That's how crazy this actually is. That being said, one last note before we start a comparison here is that this is not to be the be all and all graphics comparison. We truly cannot even do that until the game comes out. Beyond pointing out draw distance improvements, a lot of the necessary comparisons can't be done until the game is out. This is meant to be the best of what can be accomplished right now. That being said, we have essentially one image comparison we can do that I think best represents the improvements Tiers of the Kingdom brings to the table compared to Breath of the Wild. These two images of Zelda, now Zelda has a more intricate garb on, so that is less of a focus here beyond the fact that it is clearer as in higher resolution, likely depicting 1080p versus 900p in Breath of the Wild. Not only is the lighting more dynamic in general, you can see much more detail in Zelda's hair. You can make out strands of hair instead of just blobs of hair. You can also make much more finer details out on her ears. Not only is this Zelda simply more detailed from the garb and jewelry she wears, just her basic features even seem to stand out more. This is without pointing out the obvious improvements in the background draw distance and textures. That hill, not even that far away in the Breath of the Wild shot, is a bit of a blob and in the instance of stuff even further out, blurrier. In Tiers of the Kingdom, that's just not the case. I was going to draw more attention to the clouds being different between the games, but I also noticed that that's extremely situational. As seen in these two comparison shots with Zelda, the clouds basically look the same in the distance and we never really get too up close to clouds in Breath of the Wild, the way we do with the sky islands in Tiers of the Kingdom. So while the clouds look amazing on the sky islands, it's kind of unfair to Breath of the Wild as they never really dealt with clouds up close. At a distance from Hyrule, they do appear to be look very very similar in these two shots and have in other ground shots as well. Now that's a lot of information to just try to glean from one image comparison and certainly this may not represent the full game. But it's very hard to make these comparisons until the game comes out, but I do think the evidence is pretty strong and compelling. Now when we look at other people's footage out there, comparing just the map differences and trying to go one to one, it's inarguable that Breath of the Wild seems to look a little bit better in some cases and a lot of this I think is just because, hey, they're able to use direct capture of Breath of the Wild footage versus a downloaded trailer that's then recompressed by that and re-uploaded. I do think that at the moment, the differences graphically between the two games aren't so stark as to most general audiences being able to notice by looking. You could easily have a little gameplay clip from Breath of the Wild and a little gameplay clip from Tiers of the Kingdom ask a random person on the street and they'll probably tell you it's the exact same game. And you know what? That's fair. Only the trained eyes are really going to be able to see and appreciate some of the differences that exist between these two games. But that's not really the point. The graphics have been improved, the resolution has been improved, heck, the frame rate's probably been improved, and they're already doing more things in this game than we have seen in Breath of the Wild, more enemies on screen at once. It looks like we have epic battles with partner characters that just wasn't possible in Breath of the Wild because the frame rate wouldn't have been able to handle it. So they are doing other things that are more technically impressive than what they could do on the Wii U, but a lot of that's not going to be given the proper credit or context that it should outside of videos that draw attention to it like this one. Like in the end, it really doesn't matter. One game is a direct sequel to the other. One's going to look a little bit better, have a lot more action going on, but they're fundamentally going to look very, very similar, especially in motion because how many of us, when we're playing Breath of the Wild, and this is just me maybe speaking for myself, I don't know about you guys, but as I'm playing Breath of the Wild, how often are we really paying attention to if the background's blurry or not? Are we really looking there? Like I don't know about you guys, but when I'm playing video games, I'm not sitting here hyper focused in on any individual section of a scene besides what my character is doing. Like I'm looking at my horse, I'm looking at Link riding, maybe I'm glancing at the minimap, maybe I'm thinking about my next destination, or if I'm going to use an ability coming up to help climb. That's usually what I'm thinking about. I'm less thinking about, man, that looks blurry, man, maybe that doesn't fit. And I think that that is true here. Regardless of how you feel about these games, and there's definitely many more graphically intensive and impressive games on the market. One thing for sure is that this art direction to me is a lot more timeless than a lot of the other art directions we've seen in the past with Zelda. The Wind Waker probably being the most timeless example. And even that looked better when Nintendo decided to remake and remaster the game. So you guys got to take this all in on. I'm very curious what you thought about this graphics comparison. It's not quite the comparison I was hoping to do. But the more and more I did research and more and more I dug into this the harder and harder it was to find good shot to shot comparisons. And that just speaks wonders to obviously how good Breath of the Wild already looks and still looks in 2023. And a lot of this just because we don't have the ability to direct capture stuff from, you know, tears of the kingdom for better comparisons. There will, for instance, be better ways to compare the games once it's out. Like I can go to a specific spot in Hyrule and do direct graphics comparisons between the games. I just can't do that until the game is out. So we'll probably have many more graphics debates on this. Once we have a lot more footage, a lot more clean footage and images, and obviously when the game is in our hand. So look forward to maybe a follow up video to this that kind of gives a definitive look at the graphics once we're able to direct record the game. Like because that's that that's what we really need right now to make the comparisons. Thank you guys so much for tuning in. And I'll catch you in the next video.