 Once the Tears of the Kingdom's latest gameplay came out on Tuesday, there was a lot of reactions on the internet, a lot of people excited and hyped, and also a lot of people going, yup, this confirms Tears of the Kingdom is just DLC. What's interesting, of course, is the counterarguments to everything about Tears of the Kingdom being just DLC has to do with the gameplay itself. Meanwhile, most of the people talking about the DLC aspects are talking about the world, but what are developers saying? What are actual game developers saying about this? Because clearly, if anyone understands, if this is just something you would see in a DLC or not, it would be game developers, and it kinda turns out what Tears of the Kingdom is doing almost feels like it's an embarrassment for their careers. What? Before we get into it, I want to remind you, we are on our road to 100,000 subscribers. If we somehow pull it off before Tears of the Kingdom, we'll give away a collector's edition, we'll give away a Tears of the Kingdom Switch OLED, a special pin that was only available at PAX East, and who knows what else. Thank you guys so much for being here, and let's dive into this. So, I gotta give a big shout out to fellow YouTuber and friend of the channel, PlayerEssence, for pointing out these quotes earlier today. I dug into them just to make sure they're there and they are, so we're gonna get into them ourselves right now. And we first need to talk about a guy by the name of David Goldfarb. He's actually the studio lead of the Outsiders, and they created Metal Hellsinger, a very highly praised game, and he put up a tweet saying, the new Zelda is making us all look bad. Now remember, I said something about this was sort of embarrassing for them. It's sort of talking in cheek that they're upset, but they are upset because they are impressed by what is happening. Now, JP Kellams, who's a former platinum games dev, I believe he actually works at Harmonix right now, said, encouraging all aspiring system designers to seek a new career path. Now, this was obviously in regards to Tears of the Kingdom, and then what's interesting here in looking at all of this is Michelle Plam, a senior developer at BioWare, oh my gosh, now we're getting even higher up the chain here, responded and said, I'm pretending I didn't see it. Ignorance is bliss. Now look, in a vacuum, maybe this doesn't mean a lot to you guys, and certainly if you think Tears of the Kingdom is DLC, nothing these developers say are going to change your mind, but I've been pointing this out over on Twitter and some other places this entire time that after seeing that gameplay, it's nearly impossible to just call this DLC. What they are doing from a gameplay perspective is so magical, so imaginative, so difficult to make work. The three core abilities they showed off between the fusion, the recall, gosh, I'm forgetting the one where you get to go through the ceiling of objects. All of this is so difficult to code, so difficult to make work in an organic way. Systems like this just do not exist in other games. As an example, one of the criticisms of Breath of the Wildtimes is weapon durability. Other games have had it and it wasn't as bad, or they gave you the ability to repair and blah blah blah. Nintendo goes, look, we're still going to have durability problems, but you know what? We're going to allow you to just fuse and make whatever damn weapons you want to make with just random objects in the game world. No other game does that. It just doesn't exist. It is such a unique idea and so difficult to implement, let alone well, and the way it's looking like so far it works in Tears of the Kingdom is just, it is a programming masterpiece. I mean, if you're an object oriented programming, you can already look at that footage and just go, how the hell did Nintendo pull this off? There's a reason other video games don't even attempt to do stuff like this, why they might be focused on pretty visuals or some other gameplay aspect that maybe isn't as difficult to make work so flawlessly as what Nintendo has presented here. I think the opinions of these game developers matter far far more than anything I have to say, or anything people in Zelda communities have to say, or even the critics. We're sure to get a batch of people down in the comments section saying, I don't really care, it still looks like DLC and a lot of this is just because it's still in high rule, but from a gameplay perspective, this stuff is magical and I honestly feel, and I've felt like this, even with the original Breath of the Wild back in 2016, that people aren't going to understand the magic until they play it themselves. The moment they are in the midst of the gameplay, playing it themselves, they will fundamentally understand how magical this is. Game developers can already look at this and go, holy crap, they just made the whole industry look bad. Why? Because other parts of the industry wouldn't even dare to attempt to do this because of the difficulty of pulling it off. And what's interesting, of course, is when you dive even deeper into this and you realize, hey, what was Breath of the Wild built around exploration and the core mechanics, right? We had the four Sheikah Slay abilities and then obviously we had the champion abilities. We have seen no instance of the champion abilities existing here. We don't appear to have any of the Sheikah Slay abilities either. There's no bomb, there's no stasis, right? There's no magnetesis. We don't have those core abilities and that's what the game world was built around. Now we're in this world that's been expanded, had a lot of significant changes done to it and everything that made the core gameplay function before is gone, stripped out. All we're left is with the bare bones. Oh, we can swing a weapon. Oh, we can shoot a bow. Oh, we can combine arrows with any material to create unique weapons. Why? Why do we need this? There must be some crazy gameplay elements built around it. Why do we need to fuse things all the time? What is going on? Why are we building things? This is so crazy. What is happening? And the entire game is built around these core concepts. That already makes Tears of the Kingdom so fundamentally different from Breath of the Wild. We'll still have the exploration. We'll still have the open world. We'll still have the go anywhere and do anything. But how we do it has fundamentally changed so much. It's impossible not to be impressed. See, Breath of the Wild was impressive due to its scope being an open world Zelda game, the climbing mechanics, the sailcloth, all that and obviously throwing in those abilities. But to many people it just sort of felt like an appetizer. Hey, we just needed to make the physics engine work. Now they're doing some crazy things that other developers wouldn't even dare attempt because of the sheer difficulty. And we should be applauding them even just from a technical perspective. Nintendo is proving not everything's about visuals. I understand some people are disappointed. They wanted the game to look significantly better. They wanted this. They wanted that. I get it. 60 FPS would be wonderful. But from a pure gameplay perspective, I used to program. I am so impressed by what they are doing. It's unheard of. I don't know what it is. The Zelda team is magical, man. We don't even know the story yet. We don't know the other mechanics of the game. We don't know all the crazy new enemies and other stuff happening. We got constructs. Okay, there's so much we don't know. But just from what we do know, dude, this Nintendo is crazy, man. They're just going for it. They just said, you know what? Yes, we will make fusing a thing. Yes, we will make crafting and building things, but we're going to do it our way. Yes, we are that good. I just, oh my gosh, there's even moments like in there where it looks like we can literally move parts of the damn world. Like I'm just, what is happening with Tears of the Kingdom? I have so many questions that we're not going to get answered probably until the game comes out. But man, that was one impressive gameplay showcase. I know it was very simple. It might not have been some of the exciting stuff some of you guys were hoping to see, but the moment they showed off the abilities, my mind instantly raced to how complex these systems are to work the way that they do. And that, my friends, that ain't no DLC, man. Nobody re-thinks the entire core gameplay mechanics in this way. I mean, this alone probably took three years just to program this, just to make it function. I just, I'm blown away. Thank you guys so much for tuning in. It's been a pleasure talking to you.