 Before I get in this video, I just want to remind you we're on a road to 133,000 subscribers and then 150,000 right after that. 133 is just a special number because that's how many years Nintendo has existed. So I thought it'd be neat if we just made that as a smaller short goal to try to hit 133. That being said, I'm also trying to become a full-time YouTuber, so I do appreciate everyone who subscribes to the channel. And beyond that, we have giveaway going on as well. Right now, for Prime Gaming Fest, we're giving away a replica Hylian Shield. We're giving away two collector's editions of Tears of the Kingdom and two Zelda Switch OLEDs as well. You can enter right now down in the pinned comment or description, winners chosen on June 11th. And by the way, you should just go to Prime Gaming Fest in general, which is happening June 8th through June 11th because there's a ton of giveaways. Lots of people are gonna get to win something, free games, free merchandise, controllers, et cetera. It's just a great time and there's a lot of entertainment value. So why not stop on by during one of our 12-hour live streams? All right, if you are tired of hearing praise for Tears of the Kingdom, then this video isn't for you. This is probably the third time I made a video on this topic as various outlets start to pick it up and get more developer quotes. But I'm just gonna be honest, I am not tired of singing the praises of Tears of the Kingdom. It is my favorite game of all time. Let's just dive into this IGN article posted a few days ago, diving into more developer quotes, developers they reached out to, reacting to this game because it is impressing everyone across the spectrum. So this is my Logan plant. It was posted on May 31st and it says, Zach Mumbach's been in video game industry for a long time. He's worked on AAA franchises such as Dead Space and Battlefield and is now working in his own studio that's already shipped one game and is hard at work on a second. But even the most hardened video game developers are stunned, delighted and just a little bit envious of the legend of Zelda, Tears of the Kingdom. Tears of the Kingdom is overwhelmingly impressive, he says. The bar is set so unbelievably high. Even for me, having worked in AAA for 17 years, I see that game and I'm jealous because they clearly got the time that they needed to make it really good. The game industry is in the middle of the watershed moment thanks to Nintendo's latest masterpiece. Tears of the Kingdom is dominating the conversation on social media as fans fall in love with its immersive exploration, complex building mechanics and interconnected systems. But developers are able to have an even deeper appreciation for the mastery on display in Tears of the Kingdom because of their own personal experiences with game development. While you or I can rightfully celebrate the game for everything we love about it, there's something more powerful about hearing praise from folks who know a little bit about what's actually going on under the hood. For instance, we've seen a handful of devs go nuts on the game's physics engine and this is something we've looked at before with William Armstrong drawing the bridge across the lava. IGN spoke with five game developers ranging from indie devs working on their first solo projects to devs with decades of AAA experience about the most mind-blowing parts of this Tears of the Kingdom and if a universally loved game like this is inspiring, deflating, or a little bit of both. So game developers share the most impressive parts of Tears of the Kingdom. When trying to pick just one element of Tears of the Kingdom that stands out, head and shoulders above the rest, our interview subjects had a hard time choosing. In fact, we got five different answers from our five different developers. From mum back, it comes down to the open world design on a five minute horse ride to his next objective. Mum back says he's constantly distracted by visual cues Nintendo has planted across every inch of Hyrule's expansive map. But somehow mum back says the sheer amount of content never becomes overwhelming because of the way the developers presented to the player. The open world is probably the best constructed open world ever. I can drop you anywhere in Tears of the Kingdom's map and you can spin your camera around and if you see a space that looks like something should be there you will be rewarded for going there every single time. And this just isn't a thing I see in other open world games or even close to it. The praise reaches a whole new level when incorporating the Tears of the Kingdom's building and physics engine into it meticulously designed open world. At EA mum back worked as a producer where he was in charge of breaking development processes down including figuring out how many people and how much time was needed for development to go smoothly. But even in that experience he says he can't begin to imagine how things work behind Nintendo's tightly shut doors. To make these vehicles work the way they work with the physics like the gliders and the fact that you can put rockets or fans on the back of the glider and then it's also understanding where I am standing on the glider at all times and constantly updating the trajectory of the glider based on my little tiny stick deflection movements. That's like a whole game to me. Go make that and you win an award for making that. And that's just a little part of this game. James from Indie Studio Natsukes is a solo dev working on Maple Forest, an indie game clearly influenced by top-down Zelda classics like A Link to the Past and Link's Awakening. Zelda is one of James' favorite series and main inspirations and he's similarly impressed by the ultra hand building mechanics. Even though he admits he was initially worried the construction kit was just a gimmick. When I first heard Nintendo was adding building to the game I kinda sweat a little and then the game came out and I was blown away James says. The building mechanics don't hurt the game at all they strengthen it. Now that the game has released it's obvious Nintendo thought carefully about Breath of the Wild's core strength, it's absolute freedom of exploration and it's rewarding player curiosity and experimentation and dove in and built what was surely an extremely time consuming and expensive physics and building system to make that core shine even brighter. It's crazy and it's amazing. In describing their favorite parts of the kingdom many developers found themselves inadvertently rediscovering their love for Breath of the Wild's open world design. Tears of the Kingdom is a meteor more fully realized version of the predecessor's core vision which makes the bones of Breath of the Wild's innovative elements even more impressive. Another indie developer, Aaron McDivitt of AeroGPX puts it another way. Calling attention to Tears of the Kingdom's deep sandbox, saying Nintendo's open world zealots are basically begging the player to interact with the world and game in whatever they want and in order to progress no two people will play the game the same way and that's beautiful. It fosters replayability, a sense of community and creativity all in one fell swoop. I do think it would be awesome if developers were more open to giving the player characters just enough capability, agency and sandbox flavor that could result in players finding unique ways of approaching problems and progression through their games. The player's ability to solve problems however or puzzles they want the player's ability to solve puzzles however they want is another feature that leads to viral moments in social media. Videos of unconventional problems help them to spark conversation from players sharing their own unique solutions to folks wondering exactly what is going on and I got to admit this guy shows a thing in this video and I did not solve this this way. He assumes this is the intended way to solve this. I don't think this is the intended way to solve this at all. At all. I think that the entire way I did this puzzle was definitely not like that but anyways. Moving forward, Eric Covington, a game designer reformer experienced at Blizzard and PlayStation is most impressed when Nintendo's having confidence to let the player do whatever they want. None of it is cheating or going against the designer's intention because it's all within the realm of what's intended. The intention was to get the player a plethora of toys and a sandbox in which to play with them. Nintendo doubled down on letting the player win however they wanted to. I can see other studios and games benefiting from letting their grip loosen on the intended solution to the puzzles and challenges they throw at players. Finally, retro studios artist Taylor Rollrig calls out how tears of the kingdom benefits greatly from building off another masterpiece. Breath of the Wild specifically, returning to the same Hyrule feels like revisiting a real world place for the first time in years. Rollrig also notes that Nintendo stepped up its game in the character department this time fleshing out the people Link interacts with on his second trip through this Hyrule. I feel like everywhere I go I'm genuinely meeting new people, new NPCs that are making the world feel like, yeah, Hyrule's coming back and what I did in the first game actually matters. People are able to rebuild and live their lives. So what should the industry take away from tears of the kingdom? In the years following Breath of the Wild, many games have tried to recapture its essence. We see more games than ever with stylized grass waving in the wind, ambient piano soundtracks and paragliders in the Wacozella success. But few games have replicated its true secret recipe, unparalleled exploration and player freedom. So I asked these developers what lessons the industry should take from tears of the kingdom and what takeaways big game companies might end up taking instead. Turning to Rollrig's point about Hyrule feeling more alive in tears of the kingdom, Mumbak thinks more games could benefit from the building off the worlds established in their predecessors rather than creating brand new worlds with each new entry. We're already starting to see this fairly often. Gotta war Ragnarok and Spider-Man 2 come to mind as two recent examples. While the Yakuza series successfully returned to the same map for over a decade, but Mumbak thinks that more developers should take note of this practice. Mumbak says he would love to have another game that takes place in Skyrim, for example, where towns, people and the environment have all gone massive shifts. Developers were torn on whether major studios will incorporate building mechanics into games following tears of the kingdom's mainstream success in that department. I hope tears of the kingdom style building is not shoehorned into games where the core design philosophy was originally not created with that in mind, Covington says. Now, for games that do have a creative sandbox building in some form or fashion, I definitely think those creative teams will be taking a hard look at how Zelda has implemented their systems and physics. But I don't think it'll be me make like a monumental splash in the industry in the way Breath of the Wild called out open world RPG designers. Mumbak says he guarantees executives of big king companies are telling their development teams that their games need building mechanics. But that doesn't mean we'll see building mechanics in all the finished products. As most dev teams will likely push back and say systems like that would take too much time and too much money to create. I don't think we'll see a bunch of people trying to make this game. I think that they'll be having conversations about it. And I think ultimately it's a unicorn. It's not a thing you can just go out there and emulate. Tears of the Kingdom was created under extremely rare near perfect conditions. For starters, Nintendo built this game with seemingly unlimited time and budget as an interview with series producer A.G. Aonuma revealed the game was delayed a year purely for polish. Nintendo switches historical sales success also meant there was no rush for Nintendo to deliver Tears of the Kingdom a second before it was ready. Plus there's the fact that the Zelda team started development with Tears of the Kingdom's engine, overworld combat, art direction and more already in place from Breath of the Wild giving them a massive head start and creating new content and systems right from the jump. Finally, the Zelda team led by Aonuma and long time director Hitamaru Fujiwayashi is filled with experienced senior developers who have been working on the franchise for many years. All of these elements came together to allow Nintendo to develop a generational game under circumstances that would be difficult for anyone including Nintendo itself. I find that lying really grossly overstated but to repeat, I don't want to be negative but even if most developers took the correct lessons from Breath of the Wild and now Tears of the Kingdom I'm not confident most of them will be able to do anything meaningful with them, James says. I don't think Zelda's design is something that can be learned or copied without incredible effort. Nintendo is just full of world-class talent working in an environment that's letting them realize their full potential. The result is a masterpiece like Tears of the Kingdom. For developers creating games at work while playing Tears of the Kingdom in their free time it can be daunting to feel like Nintendo has set the bar that's impossibly high to reach but the devs we spoke to are up to the challenge understanding that every team making games has something valuable to share with the rest of the industry. It is a big inspiration, Robert says. The Legend of Zelda series as a whole is what got me into wanting to be a game developer. So anytime I play anything Zelda it's usually some spark of inspiration and I want to have an impact on someone like Zelda has had an impact on me and if anything I can do in my game development can create a story that can be that for someone else then I'm going to be happy. And I love that last line. I don't know what is up with these articles ending with these super powerful closing lines. But man, I mean Zelda's impact on my life is it's almost immeasurable what it's done because major games have come out at very key points in my life and have done so much emotionally for me helping me deal with real life situations. It's insane to think that I got into content creation because of Zelda like this person got in the game development and here I am fast, fast forward from 1998 to all the way to today and I feel like sometimes, not all the time most of my content is just informative, opinionated stuff for you to use the past the time but every now and then we'll get someone telling me how much my content has helped them deal with situations in their life by just giving them a much needed distraction in a way that other people's content didn't maybe they just enjoyed my voice or enjoyed the way that I frame things or my opinions or just what I choose to cover and yeah, I know I see you comments down below that probably didn't get this far into the video complaining that I've made this video again for the third time. Well, tell developers to stop talking about the game and stop glowing about it because I am not gonna stop talking about the game and I'm not gonna stop glowing about it. This game means a lot to me and I think it means a lot to a lot of you as well and I hope the biggest takeaway the video game industry takes as we move beyond this absolute masterclass in video game design is that publishers realize what can happen when you not only keep a team together stop with the temporary employee contract junior employee fired after three month thing value your employees, keep teams together invest in those teams and give them the time to deliver a masterpiece. Now, I know not everyone can do that indie developers in particular don't have that luxury of an unlimited budget but when you're an EA studio when you're an Ubisoft studio when you're a take two studio when you're a studio for a mega corporation Embracer group should really allow this as well keep the teams together even if the last game they released maybe it wasn't the most profitable thing in the world keep the team together show value in your employees compensate them well and then give them the time to complete the project the way they wanna do it and you might find that tears of the kingdom is less of a rarity and can be more of a standard especially in the AAA space where I don't feel like there's any excuse other than executives pushing buddy buttons and wanting to maximize profits over worrying about delivering quality products when you can actually do both it might take more time but you can do both and reap massive benefits so here's hoping that that's the lesson the rest of the industry takes from this is just a sheer time Nintendo's willing to put in the dedication to their employees I also don't think that the line that this article gave about how maybe Nintendo's employees can't even repeat this let's just throw that in the trash come on we've seen this already with things like Super Mario Odyssey we've seen this with Fire Emblem we've seen this with let's just throw out there was another great example how about Kirby and the Forgotten Land we saw this with Luigi's Mansion 3 like Nintendo keeps developers together and then they grow together and as the teams grow the games they output get better and better and better we've seen this with Splatoon 1 going all the way to Splatoon 3 when you keep development teams together and you value the employees like they talked about oh so many of these developers are senior developers they didn't start that way they were junior developers and Nintendo just kept them that is the way what Nintendo is doing is giving you a blueprint what these companies in the West should have been doing this entire time so I hope that's the lesson they take is valuing employees valuing their mental health and compensating them fairly and then also hey giving them the actual time I'm not saying that Crunch will ever go away I'm not saying that it will I hope that it does one day but I can't guarantee that it does but what I can guarantee is that if they're allowed the budget if they're allowed the time if you keep them on and even if a project you did prior didn't sell it as well as you hoped you're gonna reap long-term benefits that's the lesson I hope all these studios pick up because that's the lesson the developers keep preaching over and over how did Nintendo give their employees time to do this how is Nintendo keeping their team together to make something like this how did they get a whole year to polish this game these systems are incredible look at what can be done if you just keep people together and make them happy thank you guys so much for tuning in and I'll catch you in the next video