 Alright, I know what you guys are thinking. Nate, what the hell is going on with your set? Why is there all this foam here? What? The TV is not even on. What the hell man? What? Blink? What? What is going on? Well, we are actually currently under construction at the moment to build out our set that we're going to not only be using for E3, but going to be using for the podcast and pretty much other shows in the future, other things including videos like this. Some things will look the same. Some things will just be better than they were. Got this new Loctite spray adhesive, but you know what? You're not here for any of that, right? What you're here for is the Zelda news. Zelda, Zelda, Zelda. And I can't blame you because we finally have at least some real news. I'm quoting real news, because we're not going to really hear about the game itself here. Not enough official capacity, but what we are going to see is that there's clearly a ramping up of production for the Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild 2. And that is because we now have this excellent article by Video Game Chronicle talking about how there's been a mass hiring spree happening at Monolith Soft. Now, why does that matter? Because Monolith Soft obviously works on the Xenobite series. We have pretty big hunters that are working on a brand new IP as well. But Monolith Soft also has a large chunk of their team. In fact, it looks like as of Breath of the Wild. It was a majority of Monolith Soft staff aren't actually dedicated to Xenobite and other games. They're dedicated to helping out the Legend of Zelda. And the thing is, we know that they were key in that final year or so of production on Breath of the Wild 2. So essentially what it boils down to is Monolith Soft helps with Zelda all the time, but they really ramp up how many people are working on Zelda when it gets closer to the finish line. And that's why this is such a big deal, because if they're hiring so many people specifically to help with the Legend of Zelda, that means that it's coming close to the finish line. Now that does not mean Breath of the Wild 2 is releasing this year, but it does kind of lead credence to the possibility that Nintendo might be trying to get it out this year. Now, let's get into this article because it's by Video Game Chronicle. And it says the Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild Code developer Monolith Soft is continuing to expand with a significant number of hires. In recent years, Nintendo-owned Monolith Soft has contributed to the creation of not just Zelda Breath of the Wild, but also Splatoon 2 and Animal Crossing New Leaf. Monolith is also known for its Xenoblade RPG series. On Wednesday, the Japanese studio announced a large expansion of staff at its Kyoto studio alongside the publication of six new roles, including 3D and 2D graphic artists. Very interesting. In total, the company has nearly 40 job openings listed on its website. The majority of the elicins don't actually specify an exact project, but five in particular are listed for the Legend of Zelda series, presumably Breath of the Wild 2. Of course. Hello. You hire for Legend of Zelda. They only really work on one Legend of Zelda, and that is whatever Agenomo is working on. Let's get into some more fine details here. Monolith Soft has expanded significantly in recent years, with the new Tokyo studio opening in 2019 to take the company's total locations to four, some with 270 staff across each, an increase of 50 in the last year. Once its new hires are filled, the company could be comprised of well over 300 people. Zelda Breath of the Wild 2 was announced for Switch via a trailer shown at the E3 2019 broadcast. The video featured Lincoln's own together, although no further details were announced. There was obviously a big enemy evil likely Ganondorf character snap and decided, yeah, but we'll let them slide, I'm not giving the full details on a trailer that's been out for two years. Alright. Speaking during a Nintendo Direct presentation, which was also used to announce the Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword HD, Agenomo said development of the Switch sequel was proceeding smoothly, and Nintendo planned to provide more details later this year. I'm sure a lot of you saw me and thought there might be news about the sequel to the Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild game, he said. Unfortunately, we don't have anything to share right now. We apologize. Development is proceeding smoothly, and we should be able to bring you new information this year, Agenomo added. For now, we'll have to ask you to wait just a bit longer. Agenomo confirmed in June 2019 that Breath of the Wild director Hidero Fubiashi had retained his role in the sequel, so the guy that basically did a lot of the groundwork beyond Agenomo, obviously the director is more personally involved with the product. Yeah, he's back, obviously. We've known that for a while. In an interview with Game Informer, Agenomo said we're working together really hard on this game. One of the reasons we wanted to create a continuation was because I wanted to revisit that Hyrule again and use that world again while incorporating new gameplay and new story. And that's one thing to consider here on the possibility of Breath of the Wild 2 releasing this year. I know the pandemic could have put a wrench in all the plans, but the reason I bring this up is because I think without a pandemic, we would have saw Breath of the Wild 2 last year. With the pandemic, we're seeing it this year. My thing is, I feel like because they wanted to reuse the same world, they don't have to build out a whole new world from scratch. That really cuts back on time. They're using the same engine. They're using the same visual presentation. They have the world technically already built. Obviously, they'll be expanding and adding to it and doing crazy things. But when you just talk about a new story and new gameplay, I keep thinking, you know what? Yeah, that takes a lot of work too. I'm not trying to doubt that, but it should technically be less work than Breath of the Wild took. Breath of the Wild, by the way, was in development for five, possibly six years total. When the heck did Breath of the Wild come out again? Oh, 2017. Sure, they were working on DLC back then, but they did state that they started working on Breath of the Wild 2 during 2017. So that would give it almost, what, over four years of development at this point? Close to four years of development? I think that that's more than enough time. They've turned out sequels much quicker in the past. Now, I get it, Breath of the Wild is a much bigger scope. Breath of the Wild 2 is obviously not just your everyday sequel, like Majora's Mask was factually a smaller game than Ocarina of Time in terms of how big the world was. You look at other games, you know, Direct Sequels like Spirit Tracks was actually fundamentally a lot different than Phantom Hourglass, but still those are smaller handheld games. It's pretty weird, you know, Nintendo doesn't have a lot of massive home console Direct SQL kind of games like this. Majora's Mask is really the only one I can even think of right now. I mean, Age of Calamity, we can talk about it as a prequel, but obviously it's a very different situation. So again, we'll have to wait and see what happens. I don't know if Breath of the Wild 2 is coming out this year. I do know that they're hiring more and more people for the Zelda team on Monolith's soft side. Monolith's soft is usually directly involved in some of the world building, but also a lot of polish. Monolith's soft was brought in massively on Breath of the Wild when they decided, hey, we want to bring this to Switch. We need you here. We need you to polish this game for us, making it run well on Switch. So usually when you see them, oh, they're hiring more and more people, they're getting to the end. They're getting towards the end because they need these people to just kind of help push it across the finish line. There are typically more people working on a game at the very end of a project than at the beginning or middle. So a brunt of the work might be done before these end people are brought in, but these end people really wrap up all the loose ends and really bring a project together. So we get the traditionally, usually, relatively bug-free Nintendo games. There are still bugs. Heck, the Paper Mario game I sure had a really bad, nasty save bug at one point, but typically this is a lot less buggy than a lot of other AAA games that come out. So kudos to Nintendo. I hope this goes well. It definitely sounds like we're seeing this game. Obviously, we know about the rumors and reports about possibly seeing it at E3 having a big blowout, which could suggest it's coming this year, just like they did back at E3 2016, but then 2016 didn't come out until 2017. So maybe it's early 2022 instead and it's going to be kind of lined up a month apart from Pokemon Arceus. I have no idea. Splatoon 3 is coming next year too. So maybe they're repeating next year. Maybe next year is going to be Zelda, Splatoon. We're going to get another Mario Odyssey or something. I don't know. Maybe they're pushing 2022 as like the big comeback gear beats me, but I'm pretty excited just to see this game. And I really, really think that E3 is our true opportunity to see Breath of the Wild 2 again, two years after it was originally unveiled. Anyway, folks, I'm with Interrobangest from The Center of Prime. Thank you so much for tuning in and I'll catch you in the next video. Speaking of the next video, I really need to finish this set. I really need to get this TV up and running again. Man, there's a lot of stuff I really gotta get. Like, you can see it in all like there's going to be shelves. There's going to be one, two. There's going to be three shelves here. We're going to have like this Xbox sign, except the sign lights up in case you didn't know. We also have a PlayStation sign on order. For Nintendo, it might be something else. I couldn't find a glowing Nintendo sign. And like the E3 set is like it includes this, but it also includes like here and there's going to be some cool stuff going on on the wall. Yeah, there's just a lot of work to do. That E3 set is going to be crazy, man.