 Before I get into this video, I want to remind you that we're on our road to 133,000 subscribers and I would appreciate if you just subscribe to the channel and help me chase my dreams of being a full-time YouTuber. Now on top of that, we have a giveaway going on as well for a replica Hylian Shield along with two Zelda OLED Switch editions and two Tears of the Kingdom Collector's editions as well. This is a kickoff giveaway for Prime Gaming Fest which begins on June 8th next week. We'll give more details on Prime Gaming Fest by the end of the week with an announcement video and more, but that being said, we gotta get into this video. Now we made a video, I don't know, a week, two weeks ago talking about the impossible, how devs are so impressed by what's happening with Tears of the Kingdom that they can't help but be having their jaws to the floor. But the sheer amount of polish and the way the physics and everything works to them is black magic. Let's get into this article by Polygon which describes this in more detail from even more developers including people who have worked on games like The Last of Us Part 2, God of War Raiden Rock, you know, not just some highly praised games that haven't out there for quite some time, so it says why Tears of the Kingdom Bridge physics have gained developers wowed. Again, this is by Nicholas Carpenter, an article that he wrote over on Polygon. So there's a bridge across the lava pit in The Legend of Zelda, Tears of the Kingdom, the Mara Kuguk Shrine, I still don't know how to pronounce any of the shrines in Tears of the Kingdom, but it's broken. More than half the bridge is piled up on top of itself on one side of the pit with one clipped off segment on the other. The bridge is the obvious choice for crossing the lava, but how to fix it? A clip showing the potential solution went viral on Twitter shortly after Tears of the Kingdom's release. The player uses Link's Ultra Hand ability to unfurl the stacked bridge by attaching it to a wheeled platform in the lava. When the wheel platform now attaches to the edge of the bridge, activates and moves forward, it pulls the bridge taut, splashing lava as it goes until the suspension bridge is actually suspended and can be crossed. But it wasn't the solution itself that resonated with players. Instead, the clip had game developers' jaws on the ground, and all of how Nintendo's team wrangled the game's physics system to do that. To players, it's simply a bridge, but to game developers, it's a miracle. And then here's that clip in question. You guys might remember this shrine, I know I remember doing this shrine vividly, and this is the thing, or one of the many things in this game that has developers just in awe of this physics engine. You can look at all of the individual interacting bridge pieces, plus this, a different physics item going across the lava, which is a different physics item, and then obviously you can actually walk across that bridge. Alright, so the most complicated part of this game is when different systems and features start touching each other, says Sanya Moon, a technical producer who's worked on games like 2018's God of War Reboot and its sequel, God of War Ragnarok, to Polygon. It's really impressive. The amount of dynamic objects is why there are so many different kinds of solutions to this puzzle in particular. There are so many ways that this could break. Moon pointed towards the individual segments of the bridge that operate independently. Then there's the lava, the cart, and the fact you can use Link's ultra hand ability to tie any of these things together, even the bridge back onto itself. Nintendo reportedly used a full year of Tears of the Kingdom's development for polish and it shows. The amount of different options available is a testament to the amount of work that every single person at every level of the team did, especially the QA testers Moon said. Open world games with a ton of real time physics objects like this are notoriously difficult to QA test. Another big game that inspired this sort of physics based shock and awe from game developers on social media was in 2020 when the last of this part 2 included a rope necessary for solving a puzzle. Tears of the Kingdom's bridge, the rope, and its natural seeming movement were just something players expected to work, but game developers could see how much work went into the development of it. The bridge has a ton of different points that are pulling on each other within the physics system. So Luna Nielsen, a software engineer who goes by Luna the Fox girl online and live streams about the complexities of game engines. It gets into some pretty mathy stuff. It can get really funky when something pulls a bit too much and suddenly the bridge is inside of itself. So it has to push it out. And then one thing has to move too far back. It starts getting really bad because the pieces of the bridge are basically distinct from each other's movements. Software engineer Cole Wardell put it another way. Imagine the lava bridge above. When you grab the end of it, you will pull part of it to one side, he said. Well now that drags the other attached piece a little bit with it. And the piece moving along makes the next piece move. And so on and so forth. And if any one element of the track collides with something, it has to be nudged or slid back into somewhere that doesn't collide, which moves the pieces next to it, which moves the pieces next to it, etc, etc, etc. Last time I saw something this impressive, physics and gameplay wise with the rope in Last of Us Part 2. And the rope only appeared in a few very controlled scenarios. Said Rocksteady Games senior gameplay and programmer Adit Doshi on Twitter. To be able to confidently present the player with a stack of blocks that are linked with chains that move in accurate ways without clipping, without objects shaking like crazy as it tries to figure out what it needs to do is awe inspiring. Here's The Kingdom also has its own rope like physics flex. Another viral clip shows a door opening using four wheels and a chain. That's a complex interaction and takes no shortcuts. Wardell told Polygon, as a rule, physics engines take a lot of shortcuts and make a lot of assumptions. Both for the optimization purposes and to keep developers from pulling their own hair out, Wardell said. Almost all of these shortcuts, whether it's collision-free ropes or rotating objects, only apply forces in specific ways, which would make this kind of mechanism flat out and not work. Or the chains start vibrating until it disappears from view in a single frame or some other infamous physics glitch. And this is the video you're talking about here. You see the wheels here while we're riding this here. And you hit it and you can see that it rewinds this rope all the way up the wheel and it does it on wheels on four sides to open and lower the door. So it's wrapping rope around the wheels. Pretty interesting. He said that rope bugs vibrating out of control are so common because of these problems. If you don't do everything just right, one movement will cause the other parts of the rope to move and their movement will cause more collisions. God forbid you want the rope to collide with itself. Those collisions will cause more nudges, which is more movement, which ends up with your rope vibrating out of the map. Doshi explained that complex physics are common in games, but said tears of the kingdom pushes the limits of its engine to create exceptional gameplay and puzzles. Realistic physics simulations take hours to do calculations to make sure it is highly precise and accurate. Game physics need to produce similar results every 16 to 32 milliseconds or 60 to 30 frames per second. Some games are able to avoid these complexities by designing around them. Doshi said that means restricting players actions, which is the antithesis of tears of the kingdom's design. There are constraints, but somehow in this game it still feels like nothing is off limits. In game development, it's not if physics will break down, but when gravity will senior engineer and former Call of Duty developer Josh Hortelli told Polygon. That's why there's a whole Reddit page about physics goose, other players ragdolling into oblivion or enemies bouncing off the walls. It's not that games of physics bugs or glitches are poorly made. It's really easy for things to go wrong. Cartelli stressed, however, that tears of the kingdom's physics are not magic. It's clear that Nintendo greatly understands the physics interactions in the game. What's extremely technically impressive is how stable it is and how it all fits together in a way where there's no pre-programmed solution and players can solve puzzles with complete freedom, Cartelli added. Moon noted that it's not exactly that other studios can't reach this level of technical innovation, but they don't prioritize the resources needed to do it. Often that comes down to supporting the humans who make the games we play. Tears of the Kingdom was seemingly built on top of Breath of the Wild, reportedly with a large portion of the same team working on it. There's a problem within the games industry where we don't value institutional knowledge, Moon said. Companies will prioritize bringing someone from outside rather than keeping their junior or mid-level developers and training them up. We are shooting ourselves in the foot by not valuing that institutional knowledge. You can really see it in Tears of the Kingdom. It's an advancement of what made Breath of the Wild special. According to Moon, it's increasingly common for game developers to feel like they're holding some feature or another together with duct tape. Figuratively speaking, after the person who originally spearheaded its design got laid off. There's a lot of time when wasted reconfiguring and assessing how something was well done. It's not that Nintendo doesn't have its own problems because it certainly does. And Nintendo of America QA testers spoke about the frat house experience within Nintendo of America's Washington headquarters last year, but the company does appear to value the expertise of its development staff. In addition to the overall hard work of the team, the institutional knowledge is clearly a factor in why this ended up being so smoothly done, Moon said. The more stable and happy people are, the more they are able to make games of this quality. If you want good games, you have to give a damn about the people making them. And that last statement really hits home on what makes Tears of the Kingdom so special. Look, I've seen the comments out there. I've seen you guys, some of you people out there that responded to my last video, video sense saying, you know that this really isn't that impressive, the frame rates drop here and then, look guys, there's some technical limitations with the hardware, right? We've already noted from people like Modern Vintage Gamer that with some slight memory over clocks, you can actually make the frame rate in this game in almost every situation, be it a locked 30 FPS, right? It's literally a hardware limitation and it's already been proven and if Nintendo decided that they could mess with the clocks a little bit, just with those slight memory tweaks, they might be able to fix that but Nintendo isn't going to do that because who knows if it messes with other people's games. But the point is, the point in all of this is that the frame rate stuff might just be a technical limitation that is totally fixed by new hardware. That's not what people are talking about when they talk about how impressive this game is. This entire article by Polygon, which credit the Polygon for putting together an absolutely fantastic article, reaching out to big name developers to get their insight on this, how the industry works versus what Nintendo's doing, how they somehow made this seemingly impossible game and noting at the end that the reason that this seems impossible is because of how the rest of the industry works. Letting go of people who came up with an original concept in the first place, then having other people have to duct tape that back together and make it work, that's hard. Versus Nintendo where you have Owada cutting his own salary to keep game developers. This is something that we need to remember happened back in the Wii U and 3DS days. In the heyday, when those systems first came out, Nintendo wasn't doing very well. They had their first year ever of actual net loss and they actually had that happen two years in a row. It's the first time in video game history for Nintendo that happened. Nintendo was not in a good place and Nintendo, like many other companies, could have just done what is logical. Hey, the company isn't doing very well. We're losing millions and millions, hundreds of millions of dollars a year. You know what? Maybe it's time for us to cut our losses and start firing our developers. Instead, the entire executive team, including Owada himself, took massive pay cuts, trying to encourage keeping the development staff together, noting how important that team was going to be to turning the company around. Fast forward to the launch of Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey, Super Mario 3 and Animal Crossing and all the rest, you know, Pokemon notwithstanding in here. It's very obvious to see that continuity and keeping the same development staff around and keeping them happy and making them not wanna leave and just letting them finish what they started is something that has led to this being a one-of-a-kind experience that truly feels like only Nintendo seems to pull off because they are the opposite of the culture that exists in most of the game development world where a lot of companies view every staff member as dispensable and easily replaceable. Nintendo actually values each member of the team and knows the work they do is important and matters and can only become more important and matter even more the longer they're there and the more, you know, they get credit for what they're doing, whether it's through compensation or promotion, almost all of Nintendo's promotions have come from within the company starting from the bottom. So, you know, Nintendo, as they said, isn't without issues. Their QA testing team, you know, we covered all that extensively with all the speaking out at Nintendo of America, but at Nintendo of Japan, we don't seem to have these sort of problems happening and this is where a bulk of Nintendo's magic happens, those Japanese development studios. So, we gotta just give tears of the kingdom the credit deserves, the developers the credit it deserves. Whether you get mad about the frame rate or not or whatever, the fact that all of this stuff just works is something that us as gamers sort of take for granted. We took it for granted with Breath of the Wild, but in Breath of the Wild, you know, there were some limiting factors with the abilities and those factors have just been cranked up to a thousand here and I'm just, I am utterly impressed. Every time I play this game, I'm amazed at the things that I can do, the things I can build, the way it interacts, the way the physics engine just works and makes sense. Like, say I send a Korok flying off with a rocket and I mess up, nothing about it felt like it didn't make sense. It wasn't like he teleported or bounced at a weird angle. All of it made sense. Oh, the rocket went this way, it exploded. He went over this direction and then maybe he hit a tree branch or a falling thing from the sky and that bounced him and it all just makes sense. The number of calculations happening in this game at all times and it's just flawlessly working without breaking, without clipping, without crazy shenanigans happening is utterly insane and while some of you guys might be able to point out a bug here or there, this is an open world game. This isn't happening in the controlled scenario room. Like, oh, the rope bridge or those wheels doing the rope or oh, here's that metal bridge that we're using multiple physics engine impossibilities to make work. Yeah, those might seem like enclosed rooms. Now imagine, these same physics are applied all over the damn world. It works this way in the entire world of Tears of the Kingdom. So impressive what they're doing and I don't know that Tears of the Kingdom is ever gonna not feel impressive for many of these developers. I am happy to see that some of them said it's not that what Nintendo did with Tears of the Kingdom is impossible. It's not. Other developers work hard. Other developers could pull this off. They're just not really given the ability to do so. Sort of throwing shade at all of these AAA development studios that don't value the employees. If you start valuing the employees more even if they crunch whatever, if you have to value the employees more and they stick around and you don't fire them and you're not doing temporary contracts, maybe you could get this level of polish and capabilities in a game. But until then, lots of development tricks and even something that looks super impressive will be extremely limited like Last of Us Part Two with the rope stuff. Apparently that was very, very limited in how they could do that because of just, you know, just needing to make it that way that couldn't just make that the way the whole game works. There was very specific segments of the game. Guys, I'm really impressed by Tears of the Kingdom every single day and so is the rest of the game development industry. Thank you so much for tuning in and we'll catch you in the next video.