 Hey everyone. So we're going to talk about Breath of the Wild 2 today, which is a topic I'm always passionate about because I love Zelda and we're going to actually talk about the visual upgrades for Breath of the Wild 2 and not only how impressive those visual upgrades are, at least what we've seen so far because we do have actual footage of the game, but because I actually want to sort of put to rest this narrative that the visuals of Breath of the Wild 2 are only possible if they appear on new hardware. No, this video is not about new hardware, but there is this thought process out there where, hey, we're only going to be able to get Breath of the Wild 2 on new hardware. It's not going to be on the current switch. And I find this to be utterly fascinating that we go this route considering we just got Xenoblade Chronicles 3 and we know that Monolithsoft, the makers of that game, have an entire team that works specifically on Zelda. I'm hard interrupting this right now to tell you about a brand new giveaway. Okay, so I actually knew all new subscribers from now until 100,000 subscribers on the channel. Woo! 100k. That's impressive, huh? Well, all of you guys will be entered to win $1,000 cash. Literally, you just subscribe and you're automatically entered. Also, in the month of August, you get a chance to win a $20 eShop gift card for new subscribers only. Current subscribers can enter to win a $300 grid Game Boy wall art piece, which is absolutely phenomenal. And I've got one myself hanging on the wall. You guys have seen it in some videos. It looks really, really, really good. And don't worry for 100,000 subscribers if and when we ever get there. Don't worry. I will take care of all of my subscribers as well. We'll probably have one of the largest giveaway events we've ever done because I like giving back to the community. Thank you guys so much for all of your support and let's get into that Breath of the Wild 2 conversation. And naturally, we assume one of the departments that monoliths up is working on Zelda in would be the visual space because clearly that is something that they are very, very good at open world games, visual fidelity, and let's get into why this is the case. So when we look at Breath of the Wild 2, remember there was a thought that it might be volumetric clouds. This was said by Digital Foundry. Some people have kind of broken down the footage even more to almost prove. I mean, I don't know that we have it beyond a doubt, but they sort of prove that it's not really volumetric clouds. They're still 2D clouds just done in a very, very clever way. And tricks like that are common where if it's so clever, it can fool you into thinking it's volumetric clouds, then clearly that method is really, really good. Now, when we look at Xenobit Chronicles 3, the aforementioned game by Monolithsoft, we notice that it has a lot of massive upgrades over Xenobit Chronicles 2. It's not as blurry. The frame rate is much more stable at practically a locked 30 FPS. The resolution is much higher, but beyond all that, they found other solutions for things like anti-aliasing because they tried to do anti-aliasing in Xenobit Chronicles 2, but when the game is getting so blurry, it doesn't really matter how much anti-aliasing you throw. A blurry image is a blurry image and it ends up not mattering. An anti-aliasing can actually affect performance of a game if there's not enough performance overhead. And we know that Switch is not exactly a powerful system. It was back in 2017, but today it's not really much of a powerful system. So it's just not going to have the headroom for traditional anti-aliasing on a massive open world game. So Monolithsoft made a number of changes heading into Xenobit Chronicles 3. Their lighting system is improved, but it's also static. Breath of the Wild doesn't use a static lighting system. The light basically doesn't move. The shadows don't move. They always go one direction in Xenobit Chronicles 3. That is a sacrifice they made over a dynamic lighting solution which would have naturally affected frame rates. They decided keeping the frame rate stable was more important than a dynamic lighting solution and for the most part I think they made the correct call there. But what they also implemented in Xenobit Chronicles 3 was a new upscaling technique. Instead of just lowering resolution to try to maintain frame rates, they instead use upscaling so where it might dynamically lower the resolution, they actually fill in the missing pixels to make it feel like it's still at that native resolution and this creates a much clearer picture. This is actually how many other things like FSR and DLSS will do things as well. Now the technique they use is not actually as good as DLSS, but it can get to the levels of FSR at times and it's really an interesting technology. We know that Nintendo has actually been patenting technology around upscaling and resolution bumping and a lot of people thought oh maybe this is for their next platform, maybe this is to bring classic games back really easy, but maybe it's just to be using in their standard games. Nintendo has used FSR to upscale games in terms of Nintendo Switch sports, Nintendo themselves use that, but it's not the technique that Monolithsoft used. They used a more customized technique which probably falls in line with Nintendo's patented technology around resolution bumping and this led to massive performance increases. It made Xenobit Chronicles 3 essentially look like it's running on a completely different platform than Xenobit Chronicles 2. When you put Xenobit Chronicles 2 and 3 side by side, it's a night and day difference and it makes you kind of think that man Xenobit Chronicles 3 must have been on the next Nintendo platform except it wasn't because they have mastered this technique and that has led to us even being able to have 6 active characters on screen at once. Now I'm not going to add to everything, it's perfect because of the 6 characters when you're in more intense battles, the framerates will dip below 30, but it was happening all the time in Xenobit Chronicles 2. In fact, large sections of Xenobit Chronicles 2 you would play at not only like 540p, but you'd also play it at 20fps and that was pretty pretty rough. In fact, so rough that I ended up not finishing Xenobit Chronicles 2 because as much as great gameplay can trump a lot of things, at some point lagging nonstop with blurry images that hurt my eyes just gets to be a little too much. And thankfully Xenobit Chronicles 3 in my playthrough so far does not have these issues and that is amazing. It's not that the resolution won't drop, it's that the drops aren't as noticeable because of the upscaling and I love that. And Monoliths Off is clearly going to take these techniques and apply them to Breath of the Wild 2 if they haven't already been applied to Breath of the Wild 2 because the footage we have seen so far of Breath of the Wild 2 looks significantly better than the original Breath of the Wild. And that looking significantly better is what has led people to think that this game can't be running on the current hardware. One thing we sometimes forget I suppose is that Breath of the Wild wasn't made for Switch. It was a Wii U game ported to Switch. Nintendo has actually talked at length about this all the way back in 2016 and 2017. But what's interesting in thinking about that is some presumptions that Switch isn't actually more powerful than a Wii U. Really really asinine statement that comes from just being ignorant of the situation. Switch is significantly more powerful than a Wii U. Has more RAM. Has more CPU cores that are faster. Has better GPU. Everything about Switch is better than Wii U in terms of the power of the system. It's just not a gigantic leap forward. It's not a PlayStation 4 from PlayStation 3 sort of leap. It's more of a, I don't know, if there was a PlayStation 3 pro sort of leap. It's sort of a mid-gen sort of leap. And that's because Nintendo was also leaping over to mobile technology which isn't going to be as far advanced as standalone desktop style CPU parts which is basically what's in the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. They're essentially computers and there's nothing wrong with that. I mean you could argue everything is basically a computer. The systems have always been a computer. So remembering that Switch is more powerful, it's reasoning or reasonable to think that Breath of the Wild never really fully took advantage of Switch's hardware. And we might go, well, the frame rates would drop or they were unstable, especially in the forest area. And look, I get all of that. And most of that's been patched now because the game needed to be optimized for completely different hardware even more. And they finished those optimizations. And today Breath of the Wild is pretty smooth everywhere. Even though it was a little rough at launch. Now when we consider these points in the background mind that Monolithsoft and Nintendo have new upscaling technology at their disposal that the original Breath of the Wild was made for the Wii U, not for the Switch. And then we look at the current footage. You start to get an idea that absolutely Breath of the Wild 2 is running on the current Switch. All the footage we have seen so far is probably running on the current Switch. This is what we can expect. That the Switch isn't done impressing us in some ways. Splatoon 3 looks significantly better than Splatoon 2. And if I had to venture the guess, Splatoon 2 is probably being made for Wii U at one point. So it never really fully took advantage of the Switch. And now you're seeing probably upscaling techniques and obviously taking more advantage of the hardware happening now. And that's what we're going to see with Breath of the Wild 2. It's absolutely releasing on the current Switch. This isn't a debate about if new hardware is going to come out with Breath of the Wild 2. I have no idea. You have no idea. I'm going to say no. I don't think new hardware is coming out because I don't think anything we have seen isn't possible on the current Switch. And if you think it's not possible on the current Switch, when's the last time you made a video game? I mean it's a sincere question. We make a lot of presumptions, myself included, as people that aren't active in the video game development community, and don't really understand what's possible and what's not. We keep seeing so-called impossible ports on Switch, like Doom Eternal. It's impossible. Well, apparently it wasn't impossible. We keep seeing Xenoblade Chronicles 3 doing things that you couldn't imagine a Xenoblade game could do if you just go back to Xenoblade Chronicles 2. Even the better looking Definitive Edition and Torna DLC, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 looks significantly better than them. That's the massive leap Xenoblade made. Splatoon 3 is making that leap, and Breath of the Wild 2 is making that leap as well. Now, is there going to be a leap beyond this? Probably not. Whatever we see with Xenoblade 3, Splatoon 3, Bayonetta 3, probably even Breath of the Wild 2, whatever we see with those games is probably the max performance that they're able to squeeze out of a Nintendo Switch. And sure, by the time the next major Zelda game rolls around, I think it's fair to say we'll be at the next platform, right? Nintendo has about a five to six year development cycle between major Zelda games. I'm not saying top-down, we could get a top-down Zelda, that would be wonderful, but I'm talking about the next big 3D open world Zelda game. It's probably going to be five years. And I think it's safe to presume that, I don't know, this game comes out in 2023 by 2028? Is it safe then to say there'll probably be something new out in the market from Nintendo by 2028? Is it okay to say that? That's not controversial, is it? I hope people don't get mad at me for saying by 2028 there'll be something new on the market, because I think that's a pretty safe assumption. So look, I am very, very impressed with what they are able to do with these visuals, and they're able to do this stuff because of the lessons they are learning in terms of optimization, in terms of better utilizing Switch's hardware, and yes, in terms of learning better upscaling techniques. Nintendo has never applied upscaling techniques until this generation, and they didn't even start using them until a year ago, so it's been a while. And now Nintendo is finally catching on to the masterful beauty of upscaling techniques to the point that they actually patented their own technology to do it. Now, does this mean they won't use DLSS someday, or continue to use FSR in titles like they did with Nintendo Switch Sports? Absolutely not. They'll use existing technologies when it makes sense, but sometimes it doesn't, and their own upscaling technology might be best. And Monolithsoft clearly knows what they're doing, and yes, they're working on this game. They're probably working on Splatoon 3 as well. You like the Splatoon 3 visuals? Well, guess what? Monolithsoft helped with Splatoon 2. They're probably helping with the visuals in Splatoon 3 as well. Monolithsoft seems to be Nintendo's graphics connoisseur, if you would, because every game they work on, they seem to be working on the graphics section. And you might go, how do you know that? You can go through the staff credit rolls and actually see the Monolithsoft employees where they're listed, and almost everything they're listed under has to do with visuals. So anyways, folks, I am Nathan Neurologens from Nintendo Prime. I want to thank you guys for tuning in, and I'll catch you in the next video.