 Fast travel in tears of the kingdom. It's certainly a thing that we should expect to exist, especially in a world as vast as tears of the kingdom is. It's supposedly going to encompass, well, the entire map of Hyrule that's been changed in some significant ways, along with the sky, and who knows what else. Maybe some underground, maybe we can finally go to underwater locations. I have no idea. Maybe the map of Hyrule is going to be expanded. Remember, we did see worlds beyond the boundary. Some people broke those boundaries to go see that there are some land out there. But again, they seem to be mostly aesthetic. But still, there is this idea of fast travel in Zelda. It's been in almost every single Zelda game. In fact, I'm going to go over a bunch of methods of fast travel from the past before I talk about what I think is going to happen in tears of the kingdom. And I want to hear your thoughts as well, because I actually think we might have already seen fast travel in the current trailers for tears of the kingdom. Again, we're going to explain this in a moment. But before I do, I want to remind you of today's sponsor. All right, so before we talk about the tears of the kingdom stuff, I want to look at how fast travel has worked in, I don't know, a handful of prior Zelda games. In the very first Legend of Zelda game, you got to play a recorder, and it summoned a tornado to bring you to the entrances of any of the eight dungeons. In Link's Awakening, there's fast travel tiles. You kind of step on and you can go to different areas where those tiles exist, typically outside of dungeons. In Wind Waker, you can direct a little song, and that brings on a cyclone. There's actually not a lot of places to warp to in the Wind Waker. It's one of the pitfalls of their fast travel system, but it does exist. In Link to the Past, you could play a flute, which summons a bird, but it only works in the light world. So in the dark world, you're kind of on your own. And Majora's Mask, with any of your instruments, you could play the song of Soaring, and it'll take you to any owl statue. Now, that's obviously where it's been a lot of music based stuff, right? Outside of the Twilight Portals in Twilight Princess, a lot of things have been based around music, and that's something to keep in mind, because they could return to that. However, Breath of the Wild had fast travel as well, and it did it with Sheikah Towers along with Shrine. So every Shrine you unlocked and every Sheikah Tower you unlocked would lead to a new warp point, and you would just use your Sheikah Slate, which would open up a minimap, and you could just select whatever warp point you want. This was vital in a game as large as Breath of the Wild, because it's the biggest world we've ever seen. So having a billion warp points, 120 shrines, plus all the towers, it kind of felt necessary in some situations, unless you honestly just wanted to, I don't know, ride around areas you've maybe ridden around a bunch of times already when you know a specific task you're trying to achieve. So fast travel is important, and I do think Tears of the Kingdom is clearly going to have some sort of fast travel, but so far we have not seen any shrines or any indication of Sheikah Towers. Now, to be fair, we haven't exactly seen a ton of the actual overworld of Hyrule, but from what we have seen in the background, it doesn't look like the Sheikah Towers are there or the shrines. Now, both of those were tied directly to the Sheikah, and maybe they went away after Calamity Ganon was defeated. I don't know. It's possible that that was the case. It's also possible there still are shrines, but they've just moved and we have new shrines, and because of that, the locations of the shrines aren't the same. And so just because we haven't seen them doesn't mean they're not there. It's also possible maybe Sheikah Towers are still a thing, but they went back underground and we got to make them come back up again. If you remember, beginning in the Breath of the Wild, the Towers were actually underground, and then events happened that ended up bringing them to come forward. So I do think that those mechanics can't be completely dismissed 100% as possibly being in here, but Averizell the game seems to have its own version, even if there's a similar mechanic. And I think I have an idea of what Tears of the Kingdom's fast travel mechanic is. So in the latest trailer where we got the name and release date, we saw Link towards the end of the trailer land on this sort of oddly triangle style shaped flying object. And to me, this was a really weird thing to end the trailer on because we don't really need more ways to travel in the sky. If we were going to get another way to travel, wouldn't it be a loft wing or something that gives us more freedom? We already still have the sailcloth. We've already seen that we could still paraglide and everything. So that is still a mechanic in the game. So with that mechanic, which can enable us to slow fall or move around or use certain abilities and gust up in the air, why would we need another flying object? Well, the thing is that flying object seems to be going at a downward trajectory when Link lands on it. So almost like it has a predetermined destination. Now this could just be a preset animation and it means nothing, but it could also be that it's actually downward towards a certain object. And what we notice in the background is a character outline glowing green on the ground. This character appears to be the same one from the wall paintings that, well, that's a speculation on who this character is in another video. But this isn't the only place we see this marking. Technically it's seen in a couple other places and trailers. What's interesting though is that I wonder if those places are actually warp points and how this game handles warp points is instead of just making you magically appear at the top of a hill or whatever, it actually uses a mechanic where you land on a glider that takes you directly to that warp point. So it adds like a little animation and maybe enables some more loading to happen while you're going through that animation down to that spot. Because Breath of the Wild, believe it or not, I know it's open world but what they did is they cleverly hid loading. There are things that load in the game but it's cleverly hidden behind doors opening and preset animations. And this could be one of those situations that when you warp to something or warp to a different point on the map that they wanted a preset animation to glide you to that point so they could finish loading the world around you and the enemies and everything in a more organic way that doesn't feel game breaking. When being the first time, it's also a clever trick developers use to make the world feel seamless while technically giving the game time to load in assets. So it probably serves two purposes, at least from what I can tell, in so much of helping load in the assets of the world by creating a clever, cool looking animation and then on top of that, giving you obviously the ability to fast travel. So I think that's quite interesting if that is what that is. I've thought long and hard about why we need that thing. I honestly think that this is just gonna be a new method of fast travel that they got rid of. The old method is Link no longer has the Sheikah Slate. I think Zelda has it. So Link needs a new fast travel mechanic and this will be one of his abilities that he gains with his arm or certain runes on his hand or something. We'll talk about that in another video as well. But I think this is an ability that Link learns early on and it's a gift from the goddesses or something and he'll be able to summon and travel. Now, how he summons, I don't know. They could go back to some sort of song or magical instrument or noise making thing. It also could just be literally an ability that you assign to your D-pad or something. I'm not exactly 100% sure how they're gonna do that part because obviously they didn't show that part. At least I don't think they showed that part. I guess we don't know since we don't really know how it all works. We've seen the whole teardrop thing where we think that that's Link teleporting from the ground to the sky at certain set points. But what if that teardrop thing is actually him doing fast travel? Again, we don't know. That's the fun part is what we don't know but that's what I kinda think something related to that is gonna end up being the fast travel. Now, if that's not the case, obviously the door is wide open to be anything and I wanna know your guys' thoughts. Do you agree with my little theory here? On how we've sort of seen what the fast travel mechanic is or do you think it's gonna be something else? And if it's gonna be something else, what is it? Do you think Breath of the Wild's way of doing it's coming back or do you think it's gonna be something new entirely? Will we go back to having statues and stuff like in Majora's Mask? Will we have birds magically coming out of nowhere? The Rito or whatever with the song we play and they help us travel? How is it gonna work? How's fast travel gonna work? Cause we're clearly gonna have it but how will they implement it? You guys let me know your thoughts down in the comments below. I am Nathaniel Robojes from Nintendo Prime. This is today's video on tears of the kingdom. Let me know what you think. If you enjoyed, I appreciate you subscribed to the channel. We're on our road to 100,000 subscribers and I'll catch you in that next video.