 One of the biggest talking points surrounding Tears of the Kingdom has to do with the fact that the game might not look that technically impressive. It looks too much like Breath of the Wild as in they didn't improve the visuals enough going from a Wii U game to a Switch game and there's a lot of factors at play with visual presentation especially in a compressed YouTube video but I want to dive into this and see if Nintendo did enough and maybe show you guys some evidence that is a bit clearer anyways on what we couldn't expect when playing Tears of the Kingdom. Now before we dive into this I want to remind you that we are on our road to 100,000 subscribers and if we somehow get there by the time Tears of the Kingdom comes out we'll be giving away a Zelda special edition Switch OLED, a collector's edition of the game as well and even one of those pins from PAX East. Oh, beyond all that we're actually working with a couple companies to maybe increase the prize pool a bit more so we can have some more winners. After all I just love giving back to the community and I'm so thankful to be where we are at already. So look there's a few caveats we have to have when talking about the visual presentation and the technical prowess of Tears of the Kingdom and obviously I want to shout out my fellow YouTube friend Andres Restar for first covering this topic because we might revisit some of the things that he said but I want to get into a bit of a different angle at times on this because I have some thoughts on the technical presentation of this game that I think ends up being more impressive than you might think on first glance and I understand there's a lot of people sharing images of the horse and comparing it to images of the horse riding in you know Breath of the Wild and going how can you tell these are even two completely different games and a couple caveats first off direct sequels often look like the game before them this is pretty much always the case Uncharted 1 2 3 4 whatever Last of Us 1 2 like they look like the games before them because they're using the same visual presentation obviously when you leap to new platforms you expect that visual presentation to be increased and improved upon and I do think we have improvements in Tears of the Kingdom I do think that we need to take into consideration a few things one the footage we saw is obviously highly compressed and when you're seeing uploads of the trailer reappear in videos such as mine like you're seeing right now or uploads of this gameplay it's being recompressed again so we're downloading an already compressed YouTube file and then re-uploading it back to YouTube again and compressing it further and this is before you consider the fact that we are also putting that YouTube file into a video editing program that has to render them out so then you're getting triple compression on the video before you even see it what you're seeing right now so this is not representative of what you're going to see on your TV screen and we have plenty of evidence all over the internet that it's very very hard to get a full representation of what a game looks and feels like through a YouTube video versus in real life now obviously the higher resolution we're able to capture at like if this game was in 4k and we down sampled the 1080p it can give you a pretty good feel of what 1080p would look like but we don't have that in this game and I'm not going to down sample my video to like 480p because none of us are playing this game at 480p so what would be the point of that so yeah there is some of that at play but what's interesting of course is that Nintendo released a bunch of screenshots that pretty much no one has really covered on this game on their press website and these screenshots look much clearer even through YouTube compression now still images versus motion always tends to look a bit clearer although when you're taking still images of in motion stuff that tends to be blurry these still images look great and you're going to be seeing a whole bunch of them as we go here because these still images are probably a better representation of what the game is going to look like but there's some notes we have to make of course obviously we're going to talk about the YouTube compression stuff we have to note that these could be bowl shots and what are bowl shots essentially this game could be running on a pc and if it's running on a pc then these screenshots are not indicative of what you're going to see running this natively on switch on your tv or even on your little screen so we do have to note that we're not really sure now Nintendo tends to not misrepresent their games as much as some other companies do but it is notable that we can't confirm 100% that this isn't like that what we can say is that the screenshots do look like they are directly from the gameplay because you can literally pause the video and get shot for shot comparisons so I do think these screenshots are directly ripped from the gameplay but are they representative at the end I don't know but I do think they're a bit more representative of than what we saw especially when it comes to clarity they're clearly much clearer images and at full 1080p I think might be what we expect but when we're talking about tears of the kingdom from a technical perspective we need to understand a few things and that is that there is more to it than just the visuals I think a lot of people focus in heavily on visual quality and just expected this game to be some sort of leaps and bounds better now switch is more powerful than a Wii U absolutely but I don't think anyone looks at the power leap from Wii U to switch and looks like you know impressive you know you can go back and play Xenobig Chronicles X and some of you guys might even think that looks better than Xenobig Chronicles 3 so I don't want to say that the leap is massive from a technical perspective it is with modern architecture more RAM etc but also the leap going from Wii U to switch is obviously one of the smaller leaps in generations I think we've probably had and because of that I'm not really entirely sure that we should have expected the visuals to be massively better but that doesn't mean that Nintendo hasn't taken advantage of all this extra processing power as an example and this one is the most obvious when link gets knocked off and is falling down we're seeing draw distances that were just unimaginable in tears of the kingdom we're seeing details sky islands details on the ground that are miles and miles away that we just won't not have seen in Breath of the Wild in fact it would have just been straight up popping to see certain mountains and certain clouds and details and trees and we can see a lot of this while link is falling from a very long distance away and I feel like this gives a really good representation of the draw distance increase in this game and that yes takes extra processing power you also have to consider links new abilities and and while we could do some crazy stuff with the physics system before now we're fusing things we're moving things around we have this ultra hand ability where if you pause at a certain part you can see that you can literally interact with huge sections of the world and change the world and use your imagination who knows if you could take those sections of the world and attach them to vehicles and do crazy stuff so there's a lot at play with the gameplay that obviously takes us some of that processing as well but as a gamer from a technical perspective what matters the most to me is how smooth the gameplays look it's pretty obvious this game is going to be 30 fps like almost every zel the game is there's very few zel the games that aren't 30 fps but what matters to me is that we can stay at 30 fps and I feel like for the most part what we saw in the gameplay looked like a pretty smooth experience now this doesn't mean that it stays at 30 fps there's this one point that keeps happening during the shot where the camera is panning around link standing on the cube in the sky it kind of looks like the game might be hitching a little bit or that that build of the game is hitching a little bit and it might have some slight stutter I don't know what it is I've seen this across multiple videos so I do think that maybe there could still be some frame rate issues I'm not going to sit here and pretend they don't exist but I would say overall just watching the gameplay watching the attacks watching the effects watching everything it does look like it's a bit smoother and that's impressive when you consider the sheer draw distance for being seen now another thing that's quite obvious in this game is the lighting's different and some people or will take or leave the lighting some people that prefer the lighting in Breath of the Wild of course but the lighting in Breath of the Wild was pretty static right the shadows didn't really dynamically move with the sun and it was it was a nice lighting system that created some beautiful screenshots but it wasn't a dynamic lighting system and from what we can tell in the little bit of gameplay we've seen the lighting system in Tears of the Kingdom does look to be a technical improvement you know we're seeing that the shadows are moving depending on the position of the sun and that is something that we just didn't have happen in Breath of the Wild so I'm really excited about that also the shadows themselves just look a bit clearer a bit crisper we've noticed this in prior trailers as well that the shadows and the lighting just look better and I think it's become even more evident especially when you compare the games side by side now beyond that from a technical perspective I do think there's other things that we should note and have been noted before the clouds in this game the clouds in this game were obviously next level in comparison to anything we saw in Breath of the Wild granted we didn't need the clouds to be next level but in Breath of the Wild because we weren't really meant to be up in the sky but like the clouds obviously you know are fooling people and are they volumetric and I don't really care if they're volumetric or not you know I don't know if we have a final determination I think it's just a clever use of a bunch of 2d textures but just done in a really brilliant way with some clever tricks which by the way there's clever tricks in a lot of games visually I do think the clouds are obviously pretty impressive though and I like how they're handled and clearly that's going to take some extra processing as well so from a technical perspective I would say there are several things that are really nice to have in Tears of the Kingdom that maybe we're taking a bit for granted and obviously some of this has to do with the clarity of the footage potentially being affected through compression because even from Nintendo's side right yet they have to direct core to the footage and let's let's assume they got the absolute best direct courtings of the footage ever which is why they can rip these high quality screenshots but then they have to put it through an editor right to clip everything together that's going to add some compression then they upload a youtube which adds a layer of compression then you have us downloading it which is more compression and then you have to put it back through an editor in fact so like it the footage is just being ultra compressed by the time you guys are seeing it so and everyone knows this this is just how video works so I will say that I think it's a pretty technically impressive feat so far from Tears of the Kingdom at least in comparison to Breath of the Wild now is it going to blow your socks off and make you feel like it's like this massive fundamental improvement no and I think I think that's something where if that's what you expected you probably wish this game would have went to Switch 2 and then a Switch 2 only game because obviously Switch 2 would represent a massive leap compared to EU and then you could start to expect a lot more details right you'd probably end up with an upscaled 4k image you might even be talking about a 60 fps game versus a 30 fps game you would also be talking about even higher quality textures appearing in the world and yeah maybe even some other fine details one last aspect I want to bring up and this is just something I noticed when comparison horses horses running next to each other because it's hard to do one-to-one comparison with Link's hair because Link's hair is down in this game and it's not as down in Breath of the Wild is the hair physics seem to be a bit more a bit more there it kind of reminds me of turning hairworks on in the Witcher 3 right you turn hairworks on and the hair is going all nuts and crazy like it actually would in a true physical environment and it that looks like that's what's happening in this footage as well again it's a small thing that I don't think most people are going to notice but I do think it's a technical improvement over Breath of the Wild but in the end obviously if you're impressed with these improvements it's going to be up to the eye the beholder there's plenty more we could dive into I just kind of feel like we maybe some people are being a bit too harsh on tears of the kingdom and maybe some people are praising a bit too much when it comes to the visual perspective one thing is clear it is a technical improvement and I don't think that that is deniable at this point there are some things that that maybe you know you wish would go away like there was this thing about the wild where they had this rendering line you can see about six feet in front of you that kind of looks like it's still present I don't know that we have a great confirmation of it but it looks like there might still be that little six foot in front of you rendering line which just makes things a bit clearer it's interesting it's hard to tell with compressed footage but it does look like that might still be there what we'll know more once we actually get more gameplay to confirm but I also will note that objects aren't popping in as close to you as they used to we used to have grass popping in like 10 feet 15 feet in front of us now it appears we can see much further out and because of that well there is poppin if you're looking for poppin you're going to find it which by the way there's poppin in almost every video game in the planet even on playstation 5 so if you're going to look for the poppin you will find poppin it's just much further away and because it's much further away it just makes the world more believable anyways guys let me know you think about tears of the kingdom and its technical prowess in comparison to breath of the wild so far down in the comments below I am Nathaniel Rumpeljantz and I'll catch you in that next video