 Welcome to the Zeldin former podcast. I'm your host, Alfred Tebex, joined again by the beautiful and lovely, Mrs. Nathaniel Rumpeljantz. Mrs. For two wrong corrections that like, I'm not female and I'm not married. So. Oh boy. You've done it to me. Yes. Stuff like that. Yes, I'm back after a one week hiatus. Wasn't feeling too good last week. Still not 100%. Yep, but. I remember mine, which is why sadly this week we're pushing that habanero pepper thing to next week, barring any, hopefully there's nothing else that's gonna happen. But my third's killing me. Just so you know, he canceled it. I was still willing to do it. I was willing to puke my guts out on camera for you guys, but. Yeah, we'll do it, we'll do it next week. This week's not, wouldn't be that fun for two sick guys to try to eat habanero on others. That being said, we don't have a lot of news like last week or the week before, but we've got some stuff to talk about. So we'll just jump right into that. Emily Rogers released a tweet or she tweeted out some stuff. One of the most, I guess the crux of this, her tweets have been that Breath of the Wild isn't going to be a launch game. And we can get that from the fact that she said, at one point she said it's a very ambitious game, maybe even too much, and that there have been localization of problems with the game. And because of that, because of it being too ambitious, and they haven't even begun quality testing. And quality testing for a game this big would probably take from four to six months before it can be declared publicly ready for release and consumption from gamers. So that basically means that the game won't be ready till either anywhere between March and June. So we're looking at a summer release or a late, late, late spring release. So that's kind of not the news we wanted to hear because this was a big selling point for the Switch. We know that it's going to run better on the Switch. We know that this game is highly anticipated by everyone. And this was one of the bigger reasons for people to buy Switch at launch was to have Breath of the Wild at launch. Sadly, it doesn't sound like that's going to happen. Keep in mind that these are just rumors though. We're not 100% sure on this, but we're not 100% sure that this is not not true. So, Nate, what do you think? Well, it's funny hearing you bring this topic up because I could totally tell you were reading part of my news post because you were using my words. So I'm like, yeah, my own words are being said to be accurate and we'll link to that later too. You can read the whole thing. Yeah, so I'm the one that put the report up on the site. I think I'm actually the one that spotted it first at the site just because I do follow Evan Lee Rogers and Laura Catedale and all of those various rumor people who were spot on about the Nintendo Switch just because I personally want to hear about this kind of stuff. Now, I've seen some reactions to this news that, oh, it's delayed. This is terrible. It hasn't actually been delayed because it's only announced for next year. People just presumed that meant launch with the Switch, but Nintendo has never said it was going to launch with the Switch. They've never even hinted it's going to launch with the Switch. All they have said is that it's going to really simultaneously on the Switch and the Wii. So for all we know, Nintendo had never really planned for it to be a launch game in the first place. And because they didn't unveil the Switch yet, this past E3, it's still made sense for Breath of the Wild to take center stage because they had already announced that game. So I am a little disappointed that this ends up being true now. She does note that she's even calling this, it's herself a rumor. Like, she's not even 100% sure of it. If you actually read her words carefully, her sources are not saying that it's not gonna release in March, but based on logical deduction of when the translating will all be done, it sounds like there's no way in heck it would be ready for March. So it still could be ready to go for the Switch on day one. But it's looking, if this is true, keep in mind this is also the person that said that there was going to be gender options in the game and that ended up not being true. So like a heavy grain assault with anything that comes from Emily Rogers because she's, I'd say maybe 50-50 with her rumors. So to me that's not even really what I wanna talk about because that's disappointing if it's not gonna be their launch. It's their most highly anticipated game. It's been dominating the conversation this year. It's probably gonna get a mention at the game awards as like one of the most looked forward to games for next year. Speaking of the game awards real quick, do you think we're gonna see any more footage from it at the game awards considering how liberal they've been with gameplay? I thought, you know, part of me wants to say no because they had that event on January 12th. But then part of me also says that it's kind of a good time if they wanna keep hyping the game, they could literally show what we would know 100% for certain is Switch footage at the event, like a new trailer. Just to keep driving that Switch name and all that hype for the game, which obviously makes a lot more sense if it's gonna be a launch game. But either way, I would like to see them do that because without that, Nintendo really has nothing to talk about. At the game awards, and they're always a big part of the game awards. At least they have been so far. So Zelda feel- Was it one of the investors of the game awards? Yeah, he's actually on the board. Yeah, he's on the board who helps make all the decisions and stuff. So I feel like if they're going to show anything, it has to be Zelda because I don't think they actually wanna show any other Switch games until the 12th. But again, we, you know, I don't know. But getting back to this rumor stuff, I don't even really care, I guess if it comes out at launch, it's disappointing if it doesn't. But as long as it comes next year and the more I keep thinking, it's not gonna come out at launch, the more I keep thinking it's coming. Holiday 2017, because they do need a big title for holidays and this would be a pretty big title is the part of the rumor you didn't bring up. Was the demo? The demo. Yeah, okay. So she noted, she said she's only heard whispers, whatever that means, she's almost like Jeff Keely in this way, driving hype over something that she barely knows anything about. You're no main Scott. Anyways, so essentially she's claiming that the E3 demo was kind of a dumbed down version of the game in terms of difficulty because they wanted press and media, such as myself, to focus more on exploring the world rather than worrying about complicated puzzles or harder to defeat enemies, which there's still worse of harder to defeat enemies, but in general, walking around and killing those Bokeblans is not really that difficult. And Bokeblans have never been that difficult to kill anyways. So nothing felt out of place when I played it, but the idea that that might have been slightly dumbed down and is going to be even more difficult in the final game, that excites me. That to me is also a sign that they recognize that the games have been getting too easy. So that's always the one criticism I worried about with this game, but for all the exploration, all the big bosses and all this stuff out there, is it just gonna be too easy? Do you think they'll implement a difficulty setting on the game? No. That, let me take that back a minute. They have been doing that hard mode thing lately for Hero mode. I could see them doing something like that again. I would like to see them not do it. I would rather have just straight difficulty settings, like easy, medium, hard. Well, because the hard mode really isn't necessarily like, enemies are smarter, or they come faster. It's just, well, you get three hearts, there's no health and you don't, you know. And then like double damage or something. Yeah, it's not necessarily. It doesn't make the game more difficult. It just makes, you have the ability to make less mistakes. Yeah. Which, yeah, it does make you a better player, but it doesn't actually make the encounters that much harder. And it's kind of always been my criticism of these Hero modes they put out there, or hard modes, is it's not really harder. It's just different. It just, it kind of restricts you more. And that's okay, but like people already do those kind of runs, like the three heart runs. Yeah. You know, the swordless runs, like they're really trying to restrict themselves to make the game harder. But that doesn't actually make the enemy AI smarter. And difficulty settings in most games makes the AI smarter, in addition to hitting you harder. So I would love to see that. I just don't think Nintendo's going to do that. I think if they do anything, it's just gonna be another hero mode type situation where it's just a lot easier for them to do that way. Especially with a game this big. Yeah. But again, other games this big, like The Witcher have difficulty settings. So. This is their first venture into that kind of this big of a game, so I can understand that. I wouldn't like it if that was the only thing we got. But I mean, like, this is Nintendo's first foray into something this big. Yeah. So, you know, we don't really know. Sure. But that's what's most, not logical, but most Nintendo-y is the fact that it's just gonna be like a hero mode with less health, rest assured. Which wouldn't make sense though, because the idea of this game is like survival too. So you have to craft health items and cook food. So, who knows? And to be fair, I mean, I didn't get the sense playing the demo that the game was too easy. It kind of felt almost just right, as it were. Especially for a beginning area where you're still learning how to play. But there's still some difficulty. Like the first time, the first time a lot of you guys, if you haven't watched any videos and already figured it out, the first time a bunch of you guys face step talus, you're going to die. It's going to happen. It didn't happen to me technically because my demo ran out of time the first time I faced him. But I was on my way to dying. I probably would have died the first time. Because it took me a little bit to figure out all the various mechanics because even though there's an obvious weak point, it's not necessarily obvious how to tackle that weak point. And there's so many different ways to do it, which is what really excites me about this game is a lot of the Zelda games in the past evolve and this is the way you do it. And you just go, go, go. And this is like, no, here's a weak point, but you have like, use your imagination. Use your environment. You can figure out multiple ways to do it. And so to me, the difficulty kind of felt just right. But again, I'm not going to complain if it's a little harder. That's awesome. It's just like, in the E3 demo, we know they stripped out towns and certain NPCs. So it's like, who knows what else was different about that version compared to the retail release? The demo from what I could tell from the videos that I saw seemed like a very dumb down version of what we're going to get a release whenever that release date's going to be. And to say dumb down is a lot because it didn't look like, yeah, it didn't look like a complete game right off the bat, but it still looked like it hadn't had more than any other Zelda game in it from the demo in terms of an open world and things to do. What I thought was crazy about the demo is, and I talked about this way back on the Zomperer podcast when we had the four people in person because we had four people at E3. If all they ever did was release that demo area as a game, I would be thrilled. That's how amazing that opening area is. And it really sets the bar super high for the rest of the game because this is the beginning area. So like other areas in the game should be like 20 times better than what you get at this start. And I was so impressed with the start, the polish, the variety and enemies which you just don't expect in the very beginning of a game. The variety and items, the variety and even the little bit of story you get, like how it's told and how you're introduced to the environment and how things work. It really felt organic and natural and it felt huge. That's the big thing I got out of this. That territory feels huge. It feels bigger than the entirety of Ocarina of Time. That's crazy to me. That little circle on that map to me felt bigger than the entirety of Ocarina of Time. It probably was. It probably was in terms of like actual land mass. So it's like, that's why I'm like, man, if they just released it as a standalone game, you know, not for 60 bucks, but you know, like a $30 game, I would be totally thrilled. Now, obviously, there could be a lot more. I'm really wanting to get more. And that's why I'm hoping, like you mentioned at the Game Awards, I hope they show more, because I want to know more. I think there's so much to know in this game that it's impossible for them to spoil too much before release. Maybe we'll see a story trailer. And that'd be something new. That would be something new. They usually don't do story trailers. Because it really is never a story to... I'd like to see a trailer that shows off just a small bit, like even a five second clip of a dungeon, because we haven't even seen a dungeon, you know? It's just, there's a lot of things I'd like to see. And I think this game is so big. It's kind of like Skyrim in that it doesn't really matter how much to show us pre-release. It's still only the tip of the iceberg. I think the cool thing too, is how... Not how difficult, but how under wraps this game has been. Because we haven't, we've seen some leaked stuff, but we haven't seen like leaked dungeons, bosses, towns, characters. We've only heard stuff from like third parties. Well, and that's what kind of makes me wonder about with this rumor about the localization. If the localization's not even done, that would make a lot of sense to me why nothing's getting out. Because that means the only people who actually know are all the people in Japan. And nothing ever comes out of Japan. It's just, Nintendo has such a tight grip in Japan. Nothing tends to leak out of Japan, unless it's from like a manufacturer. That's why you'll see like that one place, Nikai or whatever. You'll see some reports out of them because they have contacts inside the manufacturers. But nothing's out of Nintendo. And this game in Japan would only be inside Nintendo. So a lot of times I feel that the leaks come once it's localized. So someone at Nintendo America, someone at Nintendo of Europe, decides to tell their buddies or tell someone and then it just kind of goes around and we find out things. And it's possible partially why I hope the game comes out in March, because I think if it makes it past another E3, for starters, it won't be as impressive at a second E3 as it was at this past one. Like they can't do it better than that. So it almost feels redundant to be at another E3. Unless for some reason, it's just that much more visually impressive, which we don't know yet. We scrapped the entire game between E3 2016 and now it's completely new game. Yeah, I just don't know what they could really do to show off this big game again. And they should have, with the Switch out, they should have so many other games to talk about at E3. That Zelda really shouldn't be the focus. And I feel like if it gets delayed to summer, then it starts to become a focus again. I almost feel like it needs to hit March just based on how heavily they hit on it this year. But we'll see. I mean, even if localization isn't done, doesn't mean, and I noted this in the news post, it doesn't mean they haven't been quality testing it in Japan this whole time. It just means if we got a Japanese, like if it got region-specific sent out, as opposed to like a region-free release. So we saw it in Japan like three months earlier than we saw it in, we see it in America. And that's the thing, like that can happen. Nintendo's done it before. They haven't done it with Zelda in a while. I'm trying to remember the last Zelda game they did that with. There was one that released in Japan like three months before. Was it Triforce Heroes? No, I think that was global. That might have been a week before, maybe in Japan. Then it might be a link between worlds because I remember one of the handhelds was done. Yeah, there was some game that came out in Japan before it came out in the United States and a lot of that's localization recently. Like the game's done, it's just not localized. Yeah. So they're like, oh, why delay in Japan? The game's already done, let's just release it. The reason is because then everyone gets spoilers before they get a chance to play. Or they're tempted to download the Japanese ROM and play the game. But again, I've thought of why it's gonna probably be a worldwide release. It's too big. Yeah. Too big. And again, they can also leave credit as to why it might not come out in March because it is so big, they wanna make sure it's fully localized with no bugs. Oh. Except the ones you catch. Yeah, right. So yeah, I don't know. I mean, I don't want these rumors to be true but then I do want them to be true just because it includes the difficulty thing. And because it includes the first thing that we've actually heard about how this game runs on the Switch in terms of it apparently runs better and smoother. And I think a lot of people assume that but we weren't ever really sure because all we were told by Nintendo is there will be visual enhancements. Yeah. Without any idea what that means. Oh boy. And speaking of the Switch, we have a second rumor about the Switch. Well, a second rumor. And then this second rumor is about the Switch. There's many other rumors about the Switch. All tons of rumors. And this one comes from Laura Kate Daylove. Let's play video games. Who was right, at least I'm gonna read parts of your article again, I think, is this yours? Oh, that might have been Darren if you're reading on something for it. I wrote the one on Nintendo Prime. Yep. So we've learned some info beforehand and this is kind of the stuff we already figured. Not maybe necessarily down to the price point she gives plus this is UK. So keep in mind that these aren't gonna be direct like one-to-one American dollars or USD to UK. But she said. Darren actually screwed up his report a little bit and I'm looking at it, but go on. I'll correct you when he screwed up, sir. Okay. The report says, Darren's report says today she states the system will be sold by UK retail a game for 199 euros, I guess what that is. And 249.99 euros. I'm gonna look up that as euros or if that's the pound. Remember, there's not a whole Brexit thing that just happened, so. Yeah, I know, that's why I'm just made this. Nope, that's the British pound. Okay, so 199.99 pounds and then 249.99 pounds. She believes that there are two SKUs with this, which would make sense with the 249.99 model boasting more internal storage and a bundled game, which we can assume that it might be Breath of the Wild, we can assume it might be the Mario game, but all she says is that the rumor states that it's going to be a bundled game with more internal storage, which sounds a lot like what they did with the Wii U because you have the 32 gigabyte model with the Wii U and then the 64 gigabyte with the white and black models with two separate price points. So it's nothing new, it's nothing we haven't seen Nintendo do before. So there's no reason to discredit this immediately, but again, this is just a rumor. Yep, and it's important to note that, it's important to note with Laura Kate Dale too. Unlike Emily Rogers, she has a very long history of getting things right. She's only getting a lot of attention now because of her Nintendo Switch stuff and because she doesn't really have a massive Twitter following, but she's worked at Destructoid, she's worked at Kotaku, she's worked at a lot of big publications, now she works at Let's Play video games and she's gathered these sources over the years and learned really specific ways to vet her sources. Like she knew about the pricing and all this other stuff before, but she only had one source for it and she's one of those people that does not believe anything is report worthy if there's only one source, which is a very good policy to keep, it's something you would learn by working at big publications. One source, unless that source is the source, like if it's Reggie, is not gonna be good enough, you need multiple sources to verify. So she ended up getting the second source that she was able to verify through her vetting process and she's, unlike Emily Rogers, who has never really been forthcoming with where her sources are from, who they are, Laura Kay Dale's been very forthcoming about, these are like the areas where my sources come from, which a lot of people don't do because that could get sources in trouble, but apparently none of her sources are getting in trouble. Like she said, I have a source inside Nintendo, that's the only hint she gave. That could be anywhere inside Nintendo, you assume she's in Europe, so someone inside Nintendo of America, inside Nintendo of Europe, someone inside Nintendo of Japan, you don't really know. But she actually explains where all her sources come from. So compared to Emily Rogers, she is a lot more, a longer history of reliability. And so I'm kind of tending to believe what she has to say here. And what makes this story really interesting is actually the update on it. Game UK contacted her almost immediately after the story went up, of one denying the story, which, okay. And then two, basically telling her that she's spreading false information. Here's their generalized policy where right now they list the console for 999 pounds. They just list all things they don't know final prices for is that. And then they went on to like, if you don't remove like, the guy says something about her journalistic integrity is like gonna be permanently damaged. And that if she doesn't take the article down, they're gonna take further action, which, no, like you don't do that or say that like, why are you so angry about it? And then apparently someone above this guy ended up emailing her four minutes later, apologizing for the rudeness of the prior email, still denying the report, requesting that she edited the report and put in like an official response from them about it not being true or deleting the report. And they did not say there would be any further action because of course there's not gonna be any further legal action. It's a rumor, there is no legal action to have. If there's like a leak that got out from your company, you need to figure out where the leak came from. You don't threaten the person who reported it. So it was just really, really weird. And the fact that they were so quick to like respond to her and try to discredit her almost tells you that she knows something she's not supposed to know. Yeah, it kind of, it's like, whenever you're quickly silenced, that means that you're either right or you're really, really close to it. Yeah, and so I, you know, and she does note that this price point for these two SKUs, because obviously the biggest news that come out of this is that they're two SKUs. You know, it's that there is a bundle that there's the standard version and then there's like a premium model, which we've had rumors about this before. But what we didn't know about those rumors is that supposedly this premium bundle has more storage in it. That's a new part. We didn't know that there was gonna be like the Wii U where there'd be, you know, eight gigabyte and then it was a 32. That was not ever rumored for the Switch. It was always 32 and that's just what it's gonna be. So now it's- I hate that that's their baseline. Yeah, if that is their baseline. I hope that's not- Some people are like, oh, well maybe the premium will be 64 and I'm like, that's still not enough. Yeah. If they're not going at least 500, it's not enough. Well, like I wanted to, for example, I was looking at buying Dishonored 2 from my PC to 60 gigabyte game. If that came to the Switch at a 64 gigabyte internal storage, that's the end of that internal storage. Yeah. I mean, I get the concept of it being built around physical media. Like I get that. I think it's a brilliant concept. I think it does, you know, you don't have to install games. So in theory, you shouldn't fill your system as fast as you do like an Xbox One or a PlayStation 4. But that's got nothing to do with digital buyers. Digital buyers always use storage. That's the whole point of buying digitally. And even if you can keep your game saves and delete games and download other games, which I'm assuming they're going to let you do because you can already do that with the Wii U. It's still not the same. It's still a waste of time for a person to have to keep redownloading the game they already own. And obviously, you know, they talk about maybe there's a SD card behind the kickstand that you can put in to expand the storage to whatever they let you expand it to. You know, and that's one reason I always hated the rumor that there is no external hard drive support. That is weird. Like I make sense because it's portable. Obviously, you're not gonna plug in an external hard drive into your portable machine when you're on the go. But when you're at home, it makes a lot of sense to me to have it as an option at home. Even if you can't take those games with you when you go, you know, you can install whatever game you want on your internal and take that with you. Like at least have the option at home. But we'll see. We'll see. But this whole thing just, it screams that Laura obviously got to hold us some information that she was not supposed to have. She put it out there because companies don't respond to this. As an example, this is the second time we've heard of the 249.99 price point. We just, like a few days ago, there was a Canadian retailer that accidentally had it listed online at 230 something Canadian dollars, which it was some price point that equated to $250 USD. So they accidentally put that out there and then a mere hours later, they changed it back to whatever placeholder they normally use. And it was kind of like a, whoops, it happened. They didn't go out and threaten people about it. I'm gonna, you can't, because it was your own mistake. So this is a little different. But still, it's kind of like, what are you gonna threaten her with? False reporting, are you gonna go on, go into your local store, your like game stores in the UK and just start putting up signs as as Laura Kate Nails a fraud? Like, you can't do, she got a whole information. She's either lying or it's legit and. Or she, or the information. The information could be wrong too. And that's totally like, obviously, the information can be wrong. She has a tracker gonna be in right and being really good about vetting. So I doubt that it's 100% incorrect. But even if it is wrong, why say anything at all about it? Her, if she is doing bad reporting and if you are questioning her journalistic integrity, that'll blow up on itself on January 12th. Like, that's the same thing with Emily Rogers. Like, there's no reason to go attack her because we'll know on January 12th if all this stuff is true. Hopefully, well, they said they're gonna announce price. So we already, we'll already know for sure. I don't know if they'll announce multiple skews. I'm assuming they would. That's so close to launch. Like, they have to. But we will know the price. So like, Gabe doesn't have to say anything if this isn't true. Because they're not the ones reporting it. So they have nothing to lose. But now they look like crap because they went off and attacked a media member for reporting on something that they clearly do not want to be have reported on. And I think a lot of it's, they're trying to cover their butt because if this is true. Like they let out information they should. Yeah, like, if this is true, that means that Nintendo already told retailers. Because basically, what this is is this price is not the suggested retail price from Nintendo. She does notice that this is not Nintendo's set suggested retail price. What this is based upon is what Game UK has been told the unit is going to cost to have it in their stores. So basically the unit itself is gonna cost about somewhere between like $1.99 from Nintendo. So when you buy that system in the store, £1.99 of that goes right back to Nintendo who uses it for the manufacturing, the shipping, all that stuff. The rest of the money will get split up between the retailer cost and the shipping, the packaging, retail space, et cetera. But essentially they're marking it up what you normally would mark up something at that price. So this would be probably around what the suggested retail price would be. So that means that the bigger news coming out of it is that the apparent cost of the system to the retailer got out and that never gets out. So like, if that's true, I could see why they're really, really mad because that would be information that they could be privy to. You know, they might not know the suggested retail price but they are probably going to know what the system costs to their company because they're already probably getting orders in for it for launch. So it's a very sticky situation that makes me really, really believe that Laura Kate Dale is on top of her stuff here. And she absolutely refuses to take down the report. It's not going to happen. There's no legal ramifications for her having this report up. Either her reputation gets wrecked or she just keeps getting proven correct like she's been proven correct throughout her whole career. So yeah, I mean, thanks for sharing all this. I mean, I appreciate people like Laura Kate Dale, even Emily Rogers to an effect who kind of put themselves out there. I'm like, look, we have this information. Let's share it with people. Nintendo Switch, baby. See you on January 12th. That's when all this drama can end. It's not hopefully, it will be there. The Switch is going to be there on January 12th. Do you think that Apocalypse is coming or something? No, they're going to be like, stay tuned for more information on Mark. January 12th hits, the timer comes on. Oh, welcome to the Nintendo Live. And did you hear about Pokemon Sun and Moon? Isn't that great? We'll see you on March 3rd. Is it a bit great? Do you like it? Yep. The Switch. We're porting Paper Mario Color Splash to the 3D. Yeah, the Switch isn't ready. Oh boy. So what do we have to talk about next? I only hope not. Yeah. I love Phantomix. So we got a few Phantomix from the Facebook that the kids use nowadays. So we'll just go into those. The first one's from Connor Ghillie. Says, do you think Nintendo should ever flesh out Link's mother? All she has going for her was when she was mentioned in Ocarina of Time. And I would say no. I would say it depends on the game. The game. Yeah, I would say, unless we're specifically talking about Ocarina of Time, I don't think so. Unless the mother had some greater impact. Yeah, in Ocarina of Time, obviously she had a big impact. That's why Link was where he was. So it's not that you'd ever get a game that's gonna flesh it out. I mean, you could get a manga that does, but I feel like when we were able to talk about side games, that's kind of a good example where you could have a side game that is right before the start of Ocarina of Time that explains how Link got to where he is. I think that'd be more of a general, like this is all about Hyrule before Ganondorf type of thing, instead of, oh, this is a game about Link's mom. Well, we know why he was put there, because there was a war going on. Yeah, kind of the war. But having a side game take place during that war that leads to Link ultimately being where he is, I think that would just be a really cool game to have that's never gonna happen as a mainline game. Like, Hyrule Warriors 2 might explore it for all we know. There's a better chance of doing it than a mainline Zelda game does. But those other situations I've always wondered, like in the Wind Waker, you live with your grandma. What happened to mom? What happened to dad? We're never really told. They just kind of gloss over the fact that we're not around. Well, even in Link to the Past, you're done with your own stuff. Yeah, so they have no problem using your grandma. Your uncle, your sister, you know, pretty much mentioning that you have a mom, like an arcane of time, like they have no problem using these family members, but it is weird. Or even in Skyward Sword, the fact that you don't have any parents living on the only island that's thought to have you. Everyone else does. Yeah. It's like everybody else has parents, a family, except for you. And no explanation for what happened to your parents. And I think I would like to see them explore it a little more in some instances. And it doesn't need to be a lot, you know. As an example, like when we learned that the hero shade is, you know, Link from Arcane of Time and that we learned in Hyrule Historia that Link and Twilight Princess is a blood relative of the hero of time. It's like, okay, so somewhere in there, either the hero of time is your dad or whatever kid he had was either your mom or dad. And he had, he obviously found someone. Yeah, so like there's suggested connections and parenting. I think if there's going to be parents in a game, it's obviously not gonna be a breath of the while because you've been asleep for a hundred years. So any parents you might have had are dead. It's just, unless they weren't, maybe they were sleeping in some chamber somewhere. I guess I shouldn't get ahead of myself. We have no idea what's happening in Breath of the Wild. Yeah, it's very unlikely. I think there could be a game, and I've always thought this, that with the way they've been sprinkling family members in, it almost feels like we're almost building up to a point where there's gonna be a game that's based heavily around Link's family. Instead of being, go save, you know, we've already had to go save your sister thing, you know, go save your parents. Learn about your past through your family. Maybe that's what happens in Breath of the Wild. I'm sorry, yeah, it's entirely possible. You know, they keep saying you're gonna go learn about your past. Maybe there's flashbacks. Maybe there's things you end up going through and you do, you know, we do finally see, you know, more of his extended family. It's just, the game constantly references that basically Link has a family or had a family. But we don't really learn about it. And it's always been really weird to me because of all the characters in the Zeldaverse, Link is the one that feels most disconnected from the actual world. Like he doesn't belong there. Almost like he's an out of time character placed into each individual game. It's really, really weird. And we know because of Hyrule's story, thankfully Hyrule's story did connect a lot of dots, but it's still, in the games themselves, it just, it feels like they really should explore like his mother or his dad sometime. Like, even if they aren't super important people, it's okay, they don't have to be important. Because, you know, Link is destined. He's blessed, he's always supposed to come around. So it's kind of one of those, it doesn't really matter if the parents are that important. But it's important to know why Link is who he is. Like, as Link is starting to get more and more personality in each game, it's good to know who instilled that personality in them. And you would assume that's, you know, people who raised him. Like his uncle and Link to the Past or, you know, his actual parents. Like what, what did they do to make Link who he is? And I think the problem with that, with us not being able to know his parents is that if you really think about it, aside from maybe Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask, there hasn't been a lot of like human life in the games or like Hylian life. Like they're localized in like, you know, Ocarina of, yeah, in the cities, like in Ocarina of Time, you've got Kakariko Village and Hyrule Town. It's possible his mother could have been in Georgia too. Like, they're close enough to Hylians that you won't necessarily know. Yeah, but like there's never been like a, you know, an overwhelming abundance of people and thriving. Although Twilight Princess had awful lot of them. He just couldn't talk to them. Yeah, Twilight Princess had a, yeah. Their fodder, their background fodder. But, and so you had all these like, you don't have a lot of like Hylian or humanoid, like you have humanoid characters, you don't have a lot of human characters. And so I think that it's again like, you know, Nintendo doesn't really focus on story except for this game, which has a big emphasis on story along with gameplay and everything else. But they, I think aside from Majora's Mask, we haven't seen a game, a Legend of Zelda game focused on characters. Sure, I can agree with that. Like Majora's Mask was really, really focused on the characters who they were, what the story was, how this event focused that, affected them. And you know, we can't see that in other games because a lot of them don't have like huge areas of population. And story. You see. Well, that's what excites me a breath of the wild actually is the potential that side quests could have. Like the reason we didn't see the towns is because they contain story. And the story are probably partially through the optional side quests. And it's like, that's awesome. Because it hasn't been that way since Majora's Mask. Really, I mean, there was some stuff in the Wind Waker. I will give the Wind Waker credit. It did a pretty solid job with story. Kinda yeah. But nothing has been like Majora's Mask. So if like all the towns or all the mini towns are like mini clock towns where you get to know the people and get through the know the people and doing all the various side quests, you get to know a bit about yourself. Like that's awesome. That's what I want. Cause that makes all the characters matter. And I think in terms of Link's parents or like his mother as the person brought up, they don't have to be in the game. Like I'm okay if they're not in the game. I'm okay if they are in the game. But like even just some subtleties to it, like obviously this Link in Breath of the Wild doesn't have a home right now. But in other games, like in Skyward Sword, why doesn't he have a picture of his parents in his room? You know, just the little things like that that show he came from somewhere. I think are really important and have always actually been missing and not always, obviously in Ocarina of Time we do learn where he came from. But I mean, for the most part, and now thanks to Hyrule Story, we now know kind of sort of where Link came from. But it's still, it's always been like an empty plot hole in the series. And they keep running with it where we don't really need to explain where the heck Link comes from. But we'll explain to everybody else. Link is just, he's supposed to be there. He's like, it's like, but he came from somewhere, right? He was a kid. He, someone raised him, I mean. But yeah, so I would love to see them do more with it. I don't think they're going to. Breath of the Wild, well, Breath of the Wild gives them the obvious excuse to not do it. He's been asleep for a hundred years. But, and who knows? We don't know, that could be a prior link from a different game as is. So there might be not any reason to explain it. But I don't know. I want them to do more. I don't think they're good enough at storytelling apparently to even put a picture of his parents in his room. I don't think they even think about these kind of things. That would just make it a much more deeper and connected world if they could just, and like even have a side character to be like, oh, I remember when your mother did this. Like, it's such a subtle thing that really makes no difference except for making the world more believable that you live in. And I hope they do subtle things like that in Breath of the Wild. You know, I don't know if characters will recognize Link, but if they recognize, you know, things that happened in the past that you remember as a player from prior games. Like just little subtle things like that really make the world feel connected. And you got, and Wind Waker, it was brilliant doing that. Like Link felt connected to the world. Even though you didn't know the parents, the grandmother was connected. You clearly knew that was your grandmother. You clearly knew that was your sister. Everything, she had the shield and she had the outfit and even Ganondorf referenced the hero and it was in the introduction to the game. Like it was very like, even the Great Deku Tree said, you know, you remind me of, you know, a time forgotten type of thing. Yeah, it was all subtle, subtle stuff. They know how to. That they just don't, they don't seem to do that a lot. But again, a more story-focused game can allow them to do that. Breath of the Wild is as open as the exploration is and as optional as the story is. It's okay for all of it to be optional stuff as long as it's there. So I'm really hoping they do explore it. Obviously the mother is a big point, especially for Ocarina of Time. But any of his parents or anyone that raised him, it would just be good to have subtle hints to how you became who you are. Cause really we never get that. Like Skyward Sword, I was probably the big thing that disappointed me was the literal lack of understanding of why Link is who he is and where he came from. All we know is he wakes up, he's trying to become part of the Skywriting Group and he likes Zelda and he gets bullied by the bullies. But we have no background to why he's bullied by the bullies. We have no background to why he's trying to join the Knight Academy. We just, he's Link. So of course he's trying to join up. Why? What growing up made him want to be part of the Knight Academy? We have no explanation for who's been, who raised him. You know, where were his parents? Where are any family members? Everyone else has family. Zelda has family. What, or where's Link's family? It just, it's really odd. And that was really one of my, maybe two complaints I have of what Skyward Sword is that beginning part. But anyways, I think we did a pretty good job talking about possibilities there. Yeah. Good question. And then speaking of another possibility, Robert Ruiz asks about the possibility of Breath of the Wild having a huge but empty world. And this is kind of a quick response because this is kind of a quick question. But my gut instinct is to say like just instantly when I hear open worlds all the game, I think, no, it's not gonna happen. But we've seen and we've heard that they're trying to make this a living, vibrant open world. So we have no reason to doubt that it's going to be just that. I doubt it'll be empty. It's definitely gonna have stuff to do. Like we've already seen that they're gonna have different Bacoblin encampments and different enemies to fight in the field. We've heard that there's gonna be towns and villages and all these things for you to find. And I don't think it's gonna be empty. This is something that they probably, like they took the criticism from Skyward Sword and from Wind Waker and they're like, well, there's a lot of empty space around here. Let's fill it with stuff. And so this game thrives on having this open air environment where everything's alive and everything's usable and the environment is at your disposal type of thing. So I don't think it's gonna be empty at all. I, yeah. See, it's a reason for fear, but we've been proven that it's not like, not proven, but we've been told time and time again that that's not gonna be empty. See, to me it kind of depends, what's your definition of empty? If you watched all that E3 footage and you came away with the opinion that the world looks empty, then yes, it's gonna be empty to you. That is what the game is. But the thing is to build a big, believable world, can't have stuff every 10 steps you take. It's impossible. There can be stuff to interact with, whether it's grass or trees, bugs or whatever. But reality is that if you step outside, it's not exciting every five feet you go. It's just the way it is. And the world isn't believable if that's the case. If you want a world that's like that, then Majora's Mask is really your cup of tea. Games that have a lot smaller, more condensed worlds. Heck, I can even argue Skyward Sword. I know you brought it up as an example of learning from that. But really, the entire thing is a dungeon and a puzzle every area you go to. So there's always something to do. Well, I meant more along the lines of- Yeah, the sky was pretty boring. Yeah, that's actually my other complaint with Skyward Sword is this guy. But it's one of those where I like the amount of so-called empty space they had in the demo. Cause it really added a beauty to the world. Added a believability to the world. And it's not like you ever went so far that you felt like there's nothing to do. You knew that maybe not every 10 feet, but 50 feet down the way, there's a camp of vocal blends. Or you might be in an area that looks completely empty and then suddenly stuffed halus pops out of the ground. There's various, what is it? There's hunting and gathering and all this different stuff you can do. Yes, the world's gonna appear empty at times. Like when you saw the one guy fighting the guardian out in the field during the one footage, where he jumped off the horse and shot him and defeated him. The Nintendo Treehouse people has apparently pre-recorded footage, whatever. Yeah, they were fighting in a wide open area that was pretty empty. Like they were in a field and there was nothing going on. It was grass and this battle. And obviously that battle felt epic. But when that battle's not going on, yeah, that's a giant open area of nothingness. Besides, as much as grass you can burn or cut down. And I don't think that's a problem because that's the way the world is. There's fields, there's forests, there's rivers. There's all this stuff, there's mountains and they don't have to, the thrill of exploration is kind of what this game's calling for, like Breath of the Wild. They want you to feel like you are out in nature exploring and that's part of nature, is just taking in the beauty of it, not necessarily always having something to physically do. Yeah, and like Nate said, you kind of have to define empty in that aspect because the difference between like, in my idea of an empty world or an empty open world in terms of like where you travel and you get from destination to destination is the sky in Skyward Sword. Because even if it didn't have islands and like an island every five seconds with something to do, there were still other ways that it could be made better. I think, man, I think it was Barry from Game Grumps. I might be wrong. He did a video on how to fix Skyward Sword. Yeah, I remember that. Yeah, and so it talked about things like there being no cloud layer, like you could see the ground beneath you and you could look up into the sky and see individual, like all the floating islands and stuff. Yeah, it would add to the believability. Yeah, and so that's kind of what you have to look at. Like Nate said, you don't step outside into nature and everything's happening all at once. You have to go from one place to another and then there's different things that are current. Even in games like Skyrim, that's my go-to example because that's the one I play most recently. You walk outside, you go to a river. There may be enemies nearby, there may not. You could walk a long trek without fighting anyone at all. That doesn't mean that it's not a vibrant world. That just means that it's natural. It's a natural place to move about and there's rivers, there's rocks. And I liken it to, there's a lot of people that have been replaying Red Dead Redemption lately because Red Dead Redemption 2 just got announced for release next year. And the reason that some people don't just go ahead and destroy that game in like under eight hours is because they're just taking in the environment. It's beautiful to them. It tells a story. Even if you think through the Breath of the Wild demo, there's large swaths of area there that looks like a ruined castle town. That tells a story. There's nothing going on. You're just exploring all these ruins. I mean, you do eventually run into a guardian and a shrine. But again, that's also an example of there is gonna be something to do. It's not like you're gonna be just out here running around for so long, you'll never find anything to do. That's not the case. But it's that thrill of exploration I think they really wanna get across. And there's things that can excite you about that exploration that are not necessarily enemy encounters. You know, that's why I kind of feel, what do you mean by empty? If you see, what you saw from E3 looked empty to you, then it's most definitely always gonna be empty to you. But that's not the feeling I got playing the game. I got the feeling that this is a vast world with a lot of things to discover. Look at the hundreds and thousands of theories that have popped up since E3 just based on exploring the world. Like that's amazing. The amount of detail that's in the world and the fact that the world feels alive, I think really, really helps that. Like there are times in Skyrim, like the original Skyrim, not any modification version, where it does feel a little dead. Because for some reason you'll be in large about the area where like nature seems to not exist for some reason. It's weird. I don't, I don't know. It's almost like they just forgot to fully develop that area or something. But yeah, but that's the dozen sometimes. I mean, not so much with the Dishonored game, which is why, well Dishonored is not really open world. Yeah, it's more like a level-based open world system. It's, yeah, it's a different kind of game. But it's just kind of, I didn't even got that feeling with Breath of the Wild. It always felt alive. Like even if there's nothing to do, I saw some butterflies in the distance. I saw a frog jump past my feet. I see a deer running off. Like this world feels alive. And that's a large part of making me feel like I'm part of something. Isn't just having things to literally do gameplay-wise. It's enjoying the world that you're in. And I think this game more than any other Zelda game ever is trying to convey that. And if, you know, you can't harken this back to Zelda one where every screen you went on, there was something to fight. Yeah, exactly. That's a 2D top-down. And if you think about like what, what you're basically describing then if you want an enemy on every screen is you want Breath of the Wild to look like Hyrule. You're just non-stop fighting, which is fine. It's cool to like those kind of games. But this isn't really like a hack and slash type of game. And if you look at the original Zelda game, look at the art piece that they keep referencing because there's like a shot that looks like it in Breath of the Wild where Link is standing on a cliff overlooking this vast land with mountains in the background. And it looks absolutely gorgeous. And that was there since the Zelda one as an official art piece. That's beautiful. The fact that I finally, at 30 years old, hopefully 30, hopefully comes out before my 31st birthday, will get to realize that in a Zelda game is amazing to me. Like it feels like they always wanted Zelda to be like that. It just, the technology wasn't there. Or they'd like the imagination to pull it off. If they wanted Skyward Sword to be open world, it just wasn't working out. Now it's working out. And as, I think referencing something earlier from Emily Rogers where she quoted one of her sources that said, the game is ambitious, almost too ambitious. To do what they're doing requires a lot of ambition. Regardless of if her sources are right, requires a lot of ambition. And that's what I like seeing about this game. And as much as I may hate on Ocarina of Time, I don't actually hate the game. I know I've literally said I hate it, but I don't. I just strongly feel that it is massively overrated. Reality is that Ocarina of Time did feel like a game where they had a lot of imagination in terms of pushing this series to go someplace. And it does feel like we've kind of had a lack of imagination and a lack of ambition until Breath of the Wild. So I think this world is exactly what it needs to be. So long story short, again, if you already think it's empty, then it's gonna always be empty to you. But I think it's perfect and beautiful. And everything I want anyways. I mean, I know I just got to play a demo area. I don't know if the rest of the game is gonna be that way. The trailer gives me hope it's going to be because they show off a few areas, but we'll see. Hopefully in March, hopefully. Cross my fingers. Hopefully. Okay, so there are some more fan topics, but I have something else I want us to get to. So we might hit on those in a later podcast. You're gonna start keeping track of them, like I started to do it before I lost the podcast. Yeah, I mean, I'll just jack them for that. I won't take, we'll get our own fan topics for that podcast.