Tag: Zelda

Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom’s Performance On Switch Sounds Like A Minor Miracle

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There have been a lot of buggy blockbuster launches recently, but it doesn’t sound like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom will be one of them. Nintento’s latest big exclusive for the Switch has impressed many reviewers so far with how it runs on the six-year-old hardware, with even Digital Foundry’s experts marveling at how it performs.

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Back when previews dropped for the game, it seemed like there might be some big concerns around framerate drops and handheld mode performance, with anecdotal reports of slow down when crafting complex vehicles or flying between floating islands. Digital Foundry reports, however, that a pre-release patch massively improved things, alleviating those concerns.

“It’s a game changer: nearly every instance of major performance loss has been corrected resulting in a game that now holds very closely to the 30 fps target,” senior staff writer, John Linneman, said in Digital Foundry’s YouTube analysis. “Nearly the entirety of my video capture managed to maintain a solid 30 fps, at least in most instances, which for the Switch, running a game this fast and mergent is downright impressive.”

There are still some dips, mostly around using Link’s new Ultrahand ability to combine objects into useful machines—when first initiated, the game briefly drops to 20 fps—and in busy areas like Kakariko Village. Linneman points out, however, that these moments are few-and-far-between so as not to make it a big issue.

Graphically, Tears of the Kingdom looks very similar to Breath of the Wild, despite the six years separating them. Still, there appear to be slight improvements in draw distance, shadows, and cloud and mist effects. The game also apparently loads around 30 percent faster on average when fast-traveling, according to Digital Foundry’s metrics.

Gif: Nintendo / Digital Foundry / Kotaku

Handheld mode also appears to fair pretty decently, too. While the maximum resolution is capped at 720p, and thus occasionally drops below the HD threshold, it apparently looks great on the OLED Switch screen, as one might expect. The framerate does drop more often, but doesn’t sound like a deal breaker.

Several other reviews have backed up this assessment, pointing out that Tears of the Kingdom’s performance on Switch is a far cry from the bug-ridden launches of other recent Nintendo published games like Pokémon Scarlet and Violet. “Nintendo got this extraordinary game running on a 10-year-old chipset, on hardware thinner than a small stack of beer coasters, in a device I can fit in my back pocket, and it only takes up 16GB of hard drive space?” said YouTuber SkillUp in his video. “Tears of the Kingdom is a technological miracle, and that is the story that deserves to be told far more than the occasional frame drop.”

The only disappointment seems to come from the fact that a Switch 2 or Pro model didn’t arrive in time for the game. Digital Foundry points to some of the major visual improvements teased back in Tears of the Kingdom’s first trailer back at E3 2019. The scene of Link and Zelda exploring a dark cave is how the finished game opens, but it doesn’t look nearly as good as in that first glimpse.

Nintendo says new hardware won’t arrive until 2024 at the earliest. Maybe when it does, we’ll get an enhanced version of Tears of the Kingdom. In the meantime, it sounds like it plays just fine on the older console.

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Ethan Gach

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May 11, 2023
GameStop Fires Guy After Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom Switch Leak

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In March, an employee at a Massachusetts GameStop leaked on Reddit that Nintendo was probably about to reveal its long rumored special edition Zelda Switch at an upcoming mini-Direct for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Special editions such as these are highly coveted collector’s items, and news of one for the sequel to a best-selling game would be huge for fans looking to buy a new system. This week, GameStop fired the employee who leaked the news, and the employee claims he was told Nintendo helped make it happen.

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Back in March, Mike, who requested Kotaku only use his first name, posted a photo of a GameStop computer screen showing the inventory database had been updated with a secret new Switch model on the Tears of the Kingdom subreddit. It was the day before Nintendo’s big extended gameplay reveal for Tears of the Kingdom, and the employee speculated in the post that a special edition Zelda Switch which had already leaked back in December, would be announced during the stream. Mike says he got fired on April 11, about two weeks later.

In a phone interview with Kotaku, Mike said he made the leak because he was a big fan of the franchise and wanted to give others a heads up in case pre-orders went live that day. GameStop in particular has seen issues for buyers when it comes to preorders in the past, though this wasn’t a reason cited by Mike for the leak. On March 28, Nintendo did reveal a special edition Switch, and the following day pre-orders went live at GameStop and other retailers.

At the time, the Reddit post didn’t garner a ton of upvotes, and the now former employee said he didn’t think of it as a big deal since he didn’t technically leak any images or special details about the console itself, and the post itself was mostly speculative. Nintendo also tends to release special consoles such as this one for most of its major releases, such as Pokémon.

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But on April 5, a week later, Mike said the company traced the leak back to them. Coming in for his afternoon shift after watching the new Super Mario Bros. Movie on release day, he said his district manager called him into the backroom for a meeting. Joined by another GameStop supervisor via video conference, the employee said he was asked if he made the post and whether he knew it violated company policy.

Mike said he immediately confessed, but maintained he wasn’t aware it went against the company’s social media policies. The district manager took their keys and placed them on suspension, saying the final punishment could vary between a first-offense write up and termination. It ended up being the latter. And the now former employee thinks Nintendo is to blame.

When their store manager called on April 11 to deliver the bad news, he said the supervisor told them “off the record” that Nintendo had forced the company’s hand, demanding the employee be terminated over the leak. Mike shared the allegation on the Tears of the Kingdom subreddit shortly afterwards writing, “Hopefully all of you were able to get your switch pre-orders in as now I will not be able to get mine.”

GameStop and Nintendo did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Image: Nintendo

Another employee at the store corroborated Mike’s account to Kotaku, and said they were told by the same store manager in a separate conversation that Nintendo was the catalyst. “He was an amazing worker,” they said of Mike, adding that he was one of the top performers in the area when it came to achieving GameStop’s aggressive sales goals.

Whoever ultimately made the decision to fire them, the leaker would have been easy to discover. Their social media accounts, including Instagram, Twitter, and Twitch, were linked in various ways to their Reddit account, and included several references to their general geographic location, as well as selfies. “I wasn’t really trying to cover my tracks because I didn’t know it would lead to this,” Mike told Kotaku.

As a large-scale retailer staffed mostly by entry-level workers paid terrible hourly rates, GameStop has historically been a hotbed for big gaming leaks, from Assassin’s Creed to Call of Duty. But it’s rare to hear that someone was actually fired in connection with one of the leaks. It’s perhaps less surprising that this one happens to have been in connection with a big Nintendo reveal, however. The Mario maker has been on the warpath against leaks for years, most recently attempting to subpoena Discord for the private data of someone who shared images from the Tears of the Kingdom collector’s edition artbook.

When asked if the former GameStop employee ultimately managed to secure a Zelda Switch pre-order, Mike confirmed he had. “But sadly I won’t be able to afford it anymore due to lack of a job,” he said. Mike added that when his manager had to deliver the bad news over the phone they pointed out what a shame it was: “This is your favorite company and now they hate you.”

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Ethan Gach

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April 12, 2023
Big Breath Of The Wild YouTuber Hit By Nintendo After Multiplayer Mod

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YouTuber and speedrunner Eric “PointCrow” Morino released a brand new multiplayer mod for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on April 4. It basically transforms the hit 2017 Switch game into a modern open-world version of the beloved co-op Zelda spin-off Four Swords Adventures. A couple of days later, Morino says Nintendo hit him with copyright infringement claims that led some of his biggest YouTube videos to be demonetized.

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“Incredibly disappointed that Nintendo of America has decided to block my videos on Breath of the Wild,” he tweeted on April 6. “It’s the love for the community and the innovation that we bring to it that has kept it alive & brought new people to love the Zelda series. I hope you reverse your decision soon.” Morino also shared a screencap of several of his YouTube videos, including ones featuring gameplay footage from the multiplayer mod, showing they’d been flagged for copyright issues.

Nintendo didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Publishers maintain they have full ownership and control over any footage produced from their games, but they rarely seek to penalize YouTubers and other content creators for sharing it online and potentially profiting off of it. In fact most companies go out of their way to promote the sharing of footage and screenshots from their games to help spread awareness, increase sales, and cultivate a community of passionate fans.

When it comes to social media content around fan projects and mods, however, Nintendo is one company that’s often aggressively pushed back. Late last year, the Switch manufacturer went after a YouTube documentary about an abandoned pitch for a Zelda tactics spin-off, seeking to get it removed from Google’s platform. The creators eventually managed to appeal the decision and get it reversed.

In response to Morino’s post, several other big content creators chimed in. “Not good for them considering they’re releasing a new game soon and many content creators will popularize it even more and may choose not to create videos around it,” wrote Kittyplays. “Nintendo detected fans having fun and they can’t have that,” wrote LostPause. “This is sad given how much love and effort you given them and botw.”

Breath of the Wild is the fourth best-selling game on Switch, and has remained relevant years after its release in part due to the discoveries, tricks, and new stunts pulled off by people like Morino. Outside of the recent multiplayer mod, he’s drawn millions of additional eyeballs to the game with weird runs like Link growing bigger every time the A button is pressed, or trying to beat the game while both the hardest randomizer mode and the very difficult, map-changing Relics of the Past mod are active.

Morino didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment but tweeted that he’s currently appealing the decision with YouTube. “As of now, [the videos are still visible for you to watch—however, they are not monetized,” he wrote. “Hopefully Nintendo releases these claims, as I significantly transform their work and my videos are under fair use.”

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Ethan Gach

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April 7, 2023
Zelda Producer Plays Tears Of The Kingdom For 10 Mins, And The New Stuff Looks Wild

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Zelda fans have been starving for anything they can get, any crumb they can catch, and it seems like Nintendo is finally taking pity, rewarding them with a 10-minute gameplay trailer for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

During the gameplay snippet, Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma says through a translator that Tears has changed the world “in many ways,” including pieces of Hyrule that float high in the sky, or “sky islands.”

Tears of the Kingdom new abilities means less climbing

Link can reach these sky islands through his new “recall” powers, which alters an object’s movement, or “ascend,” which allows Link to pass through ceilings in a path of twisting turquoise light. The recall power lets Link take a giant boulder that fell from a floating island back up to said island like a cool rock elevator. And ascend means you no longer have to always scale the sides of mountains, keeping an eye on Link’s stamina meter while you do it.

Another new power “fuse,” lets Link combine two objects, like a branch with a boulder, and use it as a unique weapon—a hammer, in this case. “Ultrahand” is what Link will use to construct those vehicles we’ve seen in previous trailers.

Tears of the Kingdom weapon fusing

Fuse seems to be one of the game’s most versatile new powers, letting Link attach almost anything to anything to improve and alter its qualities. At one point, for example, Link attaches two fans to a raft to turn it into a sort of rustic speedboat. You can also attach objects to your arrows to increase their utility, including a hunk of meat. The term “meat arrow” is currently all over our Twitter timeline, as Zelda fans rushed to wonder what they can do with such an arrow in Tears of the Kingdom.

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Other surprising reveals include breaking weapons (in the trailer, it’s a branch that breaks, for realism) and a fresh enemy, the Construct, which looks like a stony robot.

The Zonai in Tears of the Kingdom

The lengthy gameplay trailer also appeared to accidentally confirm the presence of the Zonai, a prehistoric tribe in the Zelda universe whose ruins dot Hyrule. During the gameplay, we see Link collect something called a Zonai charge from a fallen Construct. It’s unclear what they do just yet, but it certainly has fans excited to see how much Tears of the Kingdom will explore their lore.

This is what I would call a big meal. Before today, we had a very narrow idea of what the highly anticipated Breath of the Wild sequel would contain. Existing trailers revealed that the game—Nintendo’s first $70 game (pro tip: it will be cheaper if you use a Nintendo Switch Game Voucher to purchase it)—looks even more fantastic than BoTW.

“Hopefully it runs okay on the aging Switch hardware,” Kotaku senior reporter Ethan Gach wrote at the time of the reveal.

Good graphics are a nice thing to have, and a nice thing to see demonstrated before you in a Nintendo trailer, but it isn’t something you can run with. Past trailers have provided a general sense of what the hell is going on: Zelda isn’t sure that Link will be able to handle the latest threat, but he also gets to fly through the sky on a hulking hoverboard and what appears to be a hot air balloon, so who’s really winning?

But it wasn’t enough for fans to sink their teeth in. They’ve been subbing facts for wild dreams, theorizing that Tears will feature the first speaking Ganon, some sort of lost soul mechanic. They also surmised that the game would have homing arrows, which today’s trailer confirmed…you just need to fuse your arrows with squishy yellow Keese Eyeballs to make it happen.

Today’s trailer, which continues to show Link and his verdant world at its best and adds even more gameplay mechanics to the ones previous trailers revealed, is hopefully only the start to Nintendo preparing to open up the flood gates of cold, hard Zelda information. It doesn’t have much time, anyway—the game releases for Switch on May 12.

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Ashley Bardhan

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March 28, 2023
Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom Art Book Leaks Months Ahead Of Release

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Image: Nintendo

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom isn’t due out until May 12, which means fans heavily invested in the lore and secrets of the game have three months of avoiding (what they will probably think are) spoilers ahead of them.

The collector’s edition of the game comes with a 204-page artbook, and over the weekend that book leaked online, with every damn page of it winding up posted on the GamingLeaksAndRumours subreddit. It’s the Japanese version, meaning it’s difficult to make out exactly what some of this stuff is, though that’s not a huge problem since it’s a fairly basic artbook, mostly just images with some captions underneath.

I’m obviously not going to be posting any of the images here, but I have thumbed through the pages and have good news and bad news for fans of the series. Which is good and which is bad will depend on how sensitive you are to spoilers.

First up, because this is a preorder bonus and not a full-blown, standalone artbook, it’s missing context. There are hundreds of images here but they’re not laid out in any kind of order or sequence, and without paragraphs from the developers and artists explaining in depth what everything means and why it’s there, there’s little here that you wouldn’t have expected to see in a trailer.

There are lots of images of Link wearing costumes, some familiar returning faces, some outfit designs for allies and friends, sketches of (again, familiar) bad guys and lots of illustrations of environments that, without the context I just mentioned, are basically just “here’s a cave, now here’s a room with a stone floor”.

“This book was designed to come home with you the day you bought the game”

I’m being vague not to protect anyone, but just because…this is all very standard stuff. Without the context of this art being properly explained—or from any of us actually playing the game—it’s just a book full of cool Zelda pics.

Which, of course, is all it’s meant to be. While it’s tempting to pore over this book three months out from release, hoping for cryptic spoilers and keys to Tears of the Kingdom’s lore, this book was designed to come home with you the day you bought the game. People would be free to flick through it on the bus on the way home, or in the back seat of a car, or on the couch when they’re only 23 minutes into the game. There was never going to be anything huge here, because that would be extremely stupid!

For example there’s not a single image of Ganon. There’s an illustration of Zelda, but no mention on whether she’s playable or not. We have glimpses of the monstrous transformation Link appears to be going through, but nothing more than what we’ve already seen in trailers. There’s no plot summary.

The only things that could even remotely be considered spoilers are a couple of costumes that reference older games in the series, and the return of a particularly shitty type of enemy, but those are just…facts about the game, not narrative beats.

So if you’re sensitive to spoilers and you somehow end up somewhere on the internet where this book’s leaks cannot be avoided, relax. This is a preorder bonus, not a Spoiler Tome.

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Luke Plunkett

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February 19, 2023
Big Switch Eshop Sale: Discounts On Lego, Resident Evil, And More

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Image: WB Games / NetherRealm

This week, all at once, a perfect storm of deals, discounts, and sales has hit the Nintendo Switch eShop. Batten down the hatches, open up your wallets, and check out some of these limited-time deals, including massive savings on numerous Lego titles, Mortal Kombat games, and hits from Capcom, Ubisoft, and Bandai Namco.

Before we go any further, just note that—with the exception of Ubisoft’s Mario + Rabbids—there aren’t any Mario, Zelda, or Kirby games on sale. Instead of first-party discounts, all of these sales are focused on third-party publishers and developers. But there are still plenty of great games to grab up for cheaper than usual, even if Mario and Luigi aren’t part of it.

Here are some of the best deals I spotted cruising through the various sales currently happening on the eShop. While all of these sales are ending at slightly different times, you more or less have until the end of the month (or a few days past that) to take advantage of these discounts.

Now, with that out of the way, here are the best deals I found so far. (The figures in parentheses are the normal prices.)

Lego DC Super-Villians Deluxe Edition – $11.25 ($75)
Lego City Undercover – $6 ($30)
Lego Marvel Super Heroes 2 Deluxe Edition – $9 ($45)
Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga – $30 ($60)
Mortal Kombat 11 Ultimate – $15 ($60)
Dragon Ball FighterZ – $9 ($60)
Dragon Ball FighterZ – FighterZ Pass – $10.50 ($35)
One Piece: Pirate Warriors 4 Deluxe Edition – $18 ($90)
My Hero One’s Justice 2 Deluxe Edition – $20 ($80)
Sword Art Online: Hollow Realization Deluxe Edition – $7.50 ($50)
Just Dance 2023 Edition – $30 ($60)
Immortals Fenyx Rising – $12 ($60)
Assassin’s Creed Anv. Edition Mega Bundle – $45 ($100)
South Park: The Fractured But Whole – $15 ($60)
Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen – $10 ($30)
Ace Attorney Turnabout Collection – $35 ($60)
Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings of Ruin Deluxe Edition – $25 ($70)
Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate – $12 ($40)
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy – $15 ($30)

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Up to $100 credit

Samsung Reserve

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All you need to do is sign up with your email and boom: credit for your preorder on a new Samsung device.

That’s everything that seemed cool to me. What other bargains are catching your eye?

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Zack Zwiezen

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January 20, 2023
30 Indie Games You Should Know About Releasing In 2023

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PlayStation

Thirsty Suitors is a cross between Scott Pilgrim’s battles with evil exes, stylish arcade skateboarding, and cooking segments all portrayed through a South Asian cultural lens. Outerloop Games’ RPG stars Jala as she returns to an old town with old flames, and frames their reconciliation through turn-based battles where the simple act of talking to each other is pumped up to ridiculous levels. There’s even a stage in which Jala enters a dream world where her exes appear as powerful, distorted versions of their own self-concept. Think Persona 5 but with fewer criminals. Jala explores her old town on a skateboard (more Jet Set Radio than Tony Hawk), and when she’s home with her family, she cooks with her mother in over-the-top, campy fashion. Thirsty Suitors portrays all of its storylines in this way, but there’s a grounded humanity at its core that will be exciting to see when the game launches on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and Switch.

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Kenneth Shepard

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January 7, 2023