Nintendo shares 10 minutes of gameplay footage from Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

[Shawn Knight]

In a nutshell: Nintendo has shared roughly 10 minutes of gameplay footage from the next entry in the Zelda series and if this early look is any indication, it's safe to say that Nintendo has another smash hit on its hands.

Zelda series producer Eiji Aonuma hosted the briefing and demonstrated several of Link's new abilities including Recall, which rewinds an object's movement. In the demo, Aonuma used it on a rock that had fallen from the sky to hitch a reverse ride - elevator style - up to one of the sky islands.

Crafting is also poised to be a big element in the new Zelda game. Leveraging an ability called Fuse, Link can create all sorts of new weapons and objects by combining individual items.

Fusing a tree branch with a boulder, for example, creates a giant hammer that is far more effective against enemies than the stick on its own. Arrows can be combined with a variety of other items to boost their attacks, like adding an ice element to freeze an enemy or equipping it with an eyeball to add homing abilities. Adding a mushroom to your shield will generate a puff of smoke when hit, disorienting enemies and making them easier to defeat.

Ultrahand is another type of crafting that'll help Link engineer all sorts of creations. In the demo, Aonuma lashed together some logs to make a raft, then added fans for propulsion. Notably, some of the vehicles shown in earlier trailers aren't actually in the game from the start, but where built using Ultrahand.

Ascend, meanwhile, allows Link to pass right through solid ceilings to gain access to what's on top. It even works in cavernous mountains to quickly reach the summit.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom launches on May 12 for the Nintendo Switch priced at $69.99. There's also a new Tears of the Kingdom Edition OLED Switch dropped on April 28. It's goes for $359.99 and includes a Switch Pro Controller and a Switch carrying case. Notably, the game isn't included with the bundle.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/98115-nintendo-shares-10-minutes-gameplay-footage-zelda-tears.html

 

[naterko]

So expensive!

 

[Burty117]

They really need a Switch 2. Even the Zelda Devs have struggled to not make it look bad. Hard to hide how low res it was running.

 

[Kashim]

The ten polygons per object nonsense is getting super old. I remember the old days when Nintendo actually used decent hardware and was willing to take a hit on every console sold like every other manufacturer. Then they discovered they can make a nice profit by using hardware 3-4 generations behind and the masses will still gobble it up. So I guess there's no reason for them to ever go back to actual contemporary hardware. But can you imagine how good this game would look on an RTX 4080/4090 at 1440p or even 4K?

 

[KofeViR]

10-25 fps or? Most new games run like garbage on Switch now, especially 3rd party games and visuals are horrible as well.

Single digit fps in many newer AAA games (3rd party)...

Switch = 0.37 TFLOPS
Apple TV 3rd Gen / 2022 = ~1 TFLOPS

Nintendo should consider releasing a Switch 2 or Pro. Today hardware exist for 60 fps locked in Switch games (atleast the exclusives).

 

[kiwigraeme]

10-25 fps or? Most new games run like garbage on Switch now, especially 3rd party games and visuals are horrible as well.

Single digit fps in many newer AAA games (3rd party)...

Switch = 0.37 TFLOPS
Apple TV 3rd Gen / 2022 = ~1 TFLOPS

Nintendo should consider releasing a Switch 2 or Pro. Today hardware exist for 60 fps locked in Switch games (atleast the exclusives).

Is it a chicken or egg think as well - are they beholden to Nvidia for compatibility ?
Can anyone tell me what is Nvidia's new SOC - Is there a new Nvidia Shield chip ? a new Nvidia portable game held to play steam games or powerful tablet ?
Probably both don't care enough

Seems it's only phone SOCs that people really care about get refreshed often - other SOCs for media devices or TVs are assumed to have a long self-life .
Ie any new super chip for Roku will probably be around for another 5 years - except things are now starting to go faster than before

 

[KofeViR]

Is it a chicken or egg think as well - are they beholden to Nvidia for compatibility ?
Can anyone tell me what is Nvidia's new SOC - Is there a new Nvidia Shield chip ? a new Nvidia portable game held to play steam games or powerful tablet ?
Probably both don't care enough

Seems it's only phone SOCs that people really care about get refreshed often - other SOCs for media devices or TVs are assumed to have a long self-life .
Ie any new super chip for Roku will probably be around for another 5 years - except things are now starting to go faster than before

AFAIK Nvidia never cared much about Switch but Nintendo insisted to use Tegra (probably because of perf per watt back then). I wonder what they will use in "Switch 2" as well

If Nintendo goes the Steam Deck way and go x86 they will get a big problem with compatability I think... And I am not sure how much Nvidia is still invested in Tegra/ARM, especially for "gaming" ... Shield seems kinda outdated at this point as well, and they removed several features from it over time, it seems dead at this point, outdated and pricey just like the Switch

 

[Axeia]

Is it a chicken or egg think as well - are they beholden to Nvidia for compatibility ?
Can anyone tell me what is Nvidia's new SOC - Is there a new Nvidia Shield chip ? a new Nvidia portable game held to play steam games or powerful tablet ?
Probably both don't care enough

Seems it's only phone SOCs that people really care about get refreshed often - other SOCs for media devices or TVs are assumed to have a long self-life .
Ie any new super chip for Roku will probably be around for another 5 years - except things are now starting to go faster than before

The Steamdeck already does a decent job at emulating some Switch games. At this point the Switch is so weak hardware wise they could just emulate for backwards compatibility (even on another handheld) much like how Sony is tackling backwards compatibility for the PS3 that was on the Cell architecture.

I don't expect NVIDIA to have much interest for anything other than insanely profitable AI accelerating cards so perhaps it's time for NIntendo to join the other two console builders and go with AMD for a custom soc. Considering the Steamdeck soc was initially just meant for Microsoft Surfacebooks (but they backed out and Valve was happy to give it a shot for a handheld design) I imagine a more modern AMD soc with a heavier focus on the graphics side of the chip would do extremely well at emulating Switch games and perform very well for newer games as well.Heck, it'd have enough power to emulate any previous generation Nintendo console easily - and upscaling tech to make it look better on TV screens when docked.

Then again the Switch still seems to be selling in such numbers that Nintendo might have little interest in releasing a new one.

 

[Ohnooze]

I haven't cared for Nintendo for almost 30 years now...but to each his own.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

They really need a Switch 2. Even the Zelda Devs have struggled to not make it look bad. Hard to hide how low res it was running.

The ten polygons per object nonsense is getting super old. I remember the old days when Nintendo actually used decent hardware and was willing to take a hit on every console sold like every other manufacturer. Then they discovered they can make a nice profit by using hardware 3-4 generations behind and the masses will still gobble it up. So I guess there's no reason for them to ever go back to actual contemporary hardware. But can you imagine how good this game would look on an RTX 4080/4090 at 1440p or even 4K?

My god, you people can b!tch about anything, cant you? "Oh no, the new adventure game doesnt have orgasmic level graphics its unplayable!!!1!1!!"

The game looks fine. Looks better then anything from the PS3/360 era and comparable to some PS4/Xbone games. More importantly, it will be fun to play without microtransactions and political ads and all the other trash infesting AAA games today.

 

[Burty117]

My god, you people can b!tch about anything, cant you? "Oh no, the new adventure game doesnt have orgasmic level graphics its unplayable!!!1!1!!"

The game looks fine. Looks better then anything from the PS3/360 era and comparable to some PS4/Xbone games. More importantly, it will be fun to play without microtransactions and political ads and all the other trash infesting AAA games today.

I never said it was unplayable and I never said it wouldn't be fun, I'm actually looking forward to it. Simply pointing out that one of Nintendo's best first party developers are clearly showing the limitations of the platform vs their creative intent.

You think Switch has comparable graphics to the PS4/Xbone? I'd argue PS3/360 had better looking graphics on cross platform games than the Switch has.

Now don't get me wrong, not all cross platform games are this heavily cut back for the Switch, instead they run at half the framerate that regularly dips, hitches and freezes, whilst still having considerably cut back graphics.

The point being, and let's circle back to my original post, The Switch hardware is showing its age or really, it's lack of performance. Even games that I'm going to play and looking forward to (Zelda as per the article) can't hide the Switch hardware's lack of capability.
The developers obviously wanted a big draw distance, big open world and fluid gameplay and even in their own reveal video, aren't able to hide the low resolution, frame stuttering and lack of distance lighting / animations.

I don't know what they're going to do for Switch 2, I just hope they don't ditch the Switch form factor and allow us to play Switch games and use the Switch Dock and controllers.

Because Nvidia haven't exactly been very enthusiastic with their Tegra line of SoC's as of late, I'm concerned Nintendo might go down the Steam Deck route and go with x86 AMD chips instead, so no backwards compatibility.

 

[someOtherGuy]

The point being, and let's circle back to my original post, The Switch hardware is showing its age or really, it's lack of performance. Even games that I'm going to play and looking forward to (Zelda as per the article) can't hide the Switch hardware's lack of capability.
The developers obviously wanted a big draw distance, big open world and fluid gameplay and even in their own reveal video, aren't able to hide the low resolution, frame stuttering and lack of distance lighting / animations.

I don't know what they're going to do for Switch 2, I just hope they don't ditch the Switch form factor and allow us to play Switch games and use the Switch Dock and controllers.

Because Nvidia haven't exactly been very enthusiastic with their Tegra line of SoC's as of late, I'm concerned Nintendo might go down the Steam Deck route and go with x86 AMD chips instead, so no backwards compatibility.

I think this is a major misconception about Nintendo's strategy: the Switch is a replacement for the Nintendo DS (3DS, DS pro, whatever the name for the latest was), they gave up on the home console market after the Wii U. The Switch Dock was a nice move to seem to stay on the home console market, which still convinces people, like it's probably this case. Now, you take all your points into that fact and you'll start to see some reason into their actions.

ARM is the way to go for portability, there's no way around it, the performance per watt in x86 has never been competitive (and you're supposed to run on batteries with this). You could migrate to a "new" ARM, but that's probably not justified at this point, since the performance increase won't appeal to consumers that will be asked to buy "new everything" to play the new Zelda (Wii & Wii U?). Maybe the ARM+Vega graphics from Samsung (Exynos) would be a good combo for the updated platform but is yet to be seen if Samsung can actually pull it off. Even in that case you would be moving from NVidia to AMD/Samsung, which means added development costs but could be justified by the gains. When that equation goes positive maybe we would start hearing about the Switch's successor.

 

[Burty117]

I think this is a major misconception about Nintendo's strategy: the Switch is a replacement for the Nintendo DS (3DS, DS pro, whatever the name for the latest was), they gave up on the home console market after the Wii U. The Switch Dock was a nice move to seem to stay on the home console market, which still convinces people, like it's probably this case. Now, you take all your points into that fact and you'll start to see some reason into their actions.

Oh I'm fully aware they gave up on the home console market, I thought the Switch was a stroke of genius. Still does not change anything I've said, The Switch is powered by a chip from 2015 that's less than half the performance of a PS4. Which was absolutely fine 8 years ago but as you can see in this very article, even the first party developers are struggling to hide its age.

ARM is the way to go for portability, there's no way around it, the performance per watt in x86 has never been competitive (and you're supposed to run on batteries with this). You could migrate to a "new" ARM, but that's probably not justified at this point, since the performance increase won't appeal to consumers that will be asked to buy "new everything" to play the new Zelda (Wii & Wii U?). Maybe the ARM+Vega graphics from Samsung (Exynos) would be a good combo for the updated platform but is yet to be seen if Samsung can actually pull it off. Even in that case you would be moving from NVidia to AMD/Samsung, which means added development costs but could be justified by the gains. When that equation goes positive maybe we would start hearing about the Switch's successor.

I also agree, However, moving to a Samsung / AMD chipset concerns me when it comes to backwards compatibility. The Switch has some fantastic games that I'd like to see backwards compatibility with.

There has been more development for high performance, low power X86 SoC's than ARM based chips in the 15~ watt power envelop. Most ARM SoC's are for either mobile phones at 5 watts or servers at 200+ watts and neither are for purely gaming oriented workloads.

Nvidia announced a new Tegra chip in September last year but gave basically no details. I hope that's actually heading for the Switch 2. I just want to play Zelda without lots of flickering and a solid framerate.

There's something to be said when I can emulate Zelda on my Steam Deck and run it better for longer, than my girlfriend sat next to me on the actual Switch running legit. It's why if they did move to a low power X86, I hold some hope for Switch game compatibility through emulation.

 

[someOtherGuy]

Oh I'm fully aware they gave up on the home console market, I thought the Switch was a stroke of genius. Still does not change anything I've said, The Switch is powered by a chip from 2015 that's less than half the performance of a PS4. Which was absolutely fine 8 years ago but as you can see in this very article, even the first party developers are struggling to hide its age.

If you understand then you should realize that is not really fair to compare the Switch to the home consoles, like the PS4, which have different priorities. Maybe a good competition would be the Steam Deck.

I also agree, However, moving to a Samsung / AMD chipset concerns me when it comes to backwards compatibility. The Switch has some fantastic games that I'd like to see backwards compatibility with.

That's where the performance increase comes into play: their newer systems usually have enough extra power compared to the one before that they can use emulation. As long as they stick to ARM that shouldn't be needed, I presume.

There has been more development for high performance, low power X86 SoC's than ARM based chips in the 15~ watt power envelop. Most ARM SoC's are for either mobile phones at 5 watts or servers at 200+ watts and neither are for purely gaming oriented workloads.

Low power X86 sucks hard, we've been there and done that. If you're complaining about the performance against home consoles then low power X86 would make your blood boil. In the other hand Apple has shown what a mobile and powerful ARM looks like (M1 & M2): it's crazy what they've achieved with them.

Nvidia announced a new Tegra chip in September last year but gave basically no details. I hope that's actually heading for the Switch 2. I just want to play Zelda without lots of flickering and a solid framerate.

Sadly Nintendo is usually slow to implement new trends, like the current one: design your own silicon and then find a foundry to build it. That's probably why they're "waiting" for that "new Tegra", which is a really bad state to be in. Basically, they're outsourcing that part to nVidia since they're a fabless company too, and TSMC is the one building their chips.

 

[Slappy McPhee]

Here we are with yet again another vanilla open world 3rd person game. I was so disappointed with BotW and now will be with TotK.

 

[Burty117]

If you understand then you should realize that is not really fair to compare the Switch to the home consoles, like the PS4, which have different priorities. Maybe a good competition would be the Steam Deck.

I wasn't the one comparing the Switch to the PS4, Theinsanegamer was, I then showed him a comparison which clearly demonstrated why they aren't comparable.

Thing is, it comes with a Dock and has a specific docked mode to increase performance. They advertise the Switch as a portable AND traditional console. At least the Steam Deck, the dock is an option and has no extra performance when docked and isn't advertised as such.

Low power X86 sucks hard, we've been there and done that. If you're complaining about the performance against home consoles then low power X86 would make your blood boil.

I have a Steam Deck, low power X86 doesn't make my blood boil. Seeing Zelda run so badly because the platform they're forced to develop it on is too underpowered to really allow their creative vision to be realised, is annoying. As I said in my comment above, I actually play Breath of the Wild on the Steam Deck because it actually runs better under emulation than actually using my Switch.

In the other hand Apple has shown what a mobile and powerful ARM looks like (M1 & M2): it's crazy what they've achieved with them.

No doubt, everytime Apples SoC's come up in comment sections, I always praise how powerful and efficient they are. I also always point out, they don't matter, Apple will not sell them to anyone and will never let them run anything any of us care about. They are simply a moot point.

Sadly Nintendo is usually slow to implement new trends, like the current one: design your own silicon and then find a foundry to build it. That's probably why they're "waiting" for that "new Tegra", which is a really bad state to be in. Basically, they're outsourcing that part to nVidia since they're a fabless company too, and TSMC is the one building their chips.

This is the thing isn't it, what are the alternatives? Qualcomm? Samsung/AMD? It really is a bad state for Nintendo to be in as they basically can't easily come out with a new generation of Switch.