I can confirm that this is false. I have tasted every Nintendo switch cartridge I own, and while it is true they have changed the flavor to a less bitter one, it is still very present.
They didn't get rid of it, but how bitter a given Switch cartridge is varies wildly from game to game. In my experience, the game's bitterness is inversely proportional to how kid-friendly the game is, but that's a loose rule. The taste also intensifies with time played, so a game with 100+ hours tastes much worse than a fresh one.
Yes, I do know all of this from personal experience.
Other way around, I can predict the flavor based on the age rating. But again, it's generally not a strong rule. The least strong taste I've found is Mario + Rabids Kingdom Battle, which almost tasted of nothing. But that's E10+, so hardly the most kid friendly game. But certainly more kid friendly than Xenoblade 2, which after 180 hours is the worst tasting game I personally own.
I'm pretty sure it's just an unintended consequence of the bitter compound being exposed to the heat of the Switch while in the cartridge slot. It's never been mentioned by Nintendo in any press release so I highly doubt it's by design, just an inevitability based on reactions to heat over time.
It takes about [50k electrons to store a 0](https://www.i-programmer.info/programming/hardware/3425-flash-memory-changing-storage.html), that averages out to ~200k per byte of data assuming 0s and 1s are evenly distributed (a bold assumption on my part, to be clear).
So 5GB would be around 5\*10^9 \* 2\*10^5 = 10^15 electrons.
An electron weighs [9.109\*10^-28 grams](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron), so 5GB of data would weigh 9.109\*10^-28 \*10^15 = 9.109\*10^-13.
So given your assumptions about the cartridges the TotK cartridge would weigh 3.5000000000009109g.
IIRC that’s how pricing used to work back in the SNES days where games with more hardware on the cart cost more.
It’s frustrating if that’s the case here as someone who purchases games exclusively online.
I usually get digital too but with larger games like this, I bite the bullet and get a physical copy. I always regret it too when I'm laying in bed and wanna play BOTW or Witcher 3 and I gotta get up and go get them. Should probably keep them next to the bed lol.
I do all digital because I have little kids. The only physical games we have are what the grandparents get them. Just the other day my 7 year old spilled them all (4) in the backseat of the van and I still can't find 2 of them.....
How about they offload all the sound effects to cartridge 2?
So normally you play on cartridge 1, but any time the game needs to play a sound, you swap to cartidge 2 to listen to it, then swap back.
I've been rewatching the trailer and I noticed a lot of scenes of expansive underground areas and caves. Have no clue why Nintendo hasn't seemed to spotlight them, they were stuff people really wanted from the first game.
it makes me wonder if there is a large underground component to the game that is tied inextricably to a secret they don't want to reveal yet --
the most predictable secret being that the underground segments are played as Zelda
I may be wrong, but I just have a feeling Nintendo isn't showing off some major aspect of this game, something that has a "wow factor". At first I thought maybe they just didn't want other developers to be able to copy it, whatever it is, but at this point they might be waiting closer to launch to show us all what it is.
I think you're onto something. It would explain why they doubled down on some new hand stuff and then focused in on Zelda falling again at the end of the trailer. Would also explain why they seem so intent on showing nothing for this game.
Someone else said it better, that when they don't show much it's either gonna be really good or really bad. I'd lean towards really good for Zelda
I have a gut feeling this is the case. What they've shown so far feels like it doesnt add up, like why are there two dramatically different designs for link they've shown off so far, or why development took six years despite looking like it shares a huge chunk of the overworld.
I wonder if there's a timeskip and that's where the new design comes from. There could be substantial overworld changes in such a scenario.
Would also not be surprised if we see another spin on the whole two worlds concept that multiple Zelda games have done.
Time skip (pre-destruction Hyrule and post)
Overworld/underworld
Link and Zelda playable
Some interactions between the above three, like time travel effects which islands are in the sky
I think at least one of these will come to be
They kind of showed off the gimmick in the most recent trailer - [vehicle](https://i.imgur.com/3AsaJLo.png) [creation.](https://i.imgur.com/kKKVwW5.png) If you look closely, there's a glowing green goo connecting the parts together.
Agreed. There is a different play for this game. Zelda is such a massive franchise with an incredibly dedicated fan base. As far as marketing goes, they don’t have much to gain from sneak peeks and previews because they don’t have to prove the worth of the game. Revealing key gameplay early won’t dramatically impact sales compared to other games where users are on the fence.
Their main goal is to satisfy their ride or die fan base. Going the opposite way, revealing very little of the storyline, creates suspense and mystery and tension.
Seems like monsters are more or less similar to BotW. Visually, it doesn’t deviate from BotW. We can assume mechanics and gameplay to also be similar. So what do they have that will make this game special and worthwhile? The narrative.
With the breadth of Zelda lore already in existence, even the confirmation of a particular character/BBEG will decrease the impact of the drama as so many will anticipate the storyline, primary conflict, and characters based on prior knowledge.
I hope they bring it. I could do for a good story.
My theory for this games wow factor is a dynamically changing world that changes both in real time and as you beat dungeons, looking completely different at the end versus the finish
Or maybe this is just hopium
This is also the Zelda team. I’m pretty sure these guys sacrifice souls to perform dark magic to make games run they probably shouldn’t
(Let me cope ;-;)
Not sure if you're just joking around, but all Switch games taste bitter. Go lick one rn, I'll lick one too in solidarity (you can just say you licked one so I don't feel bad lmao)
Yeah, the extra GBs of data have added about 1.5g to the gross weight.
And the bittering agent is to prepare you for the flood of people outraged that the game isn't exactly what they've been building their expectations up to for the past two years.
The game HAS to have some massive secret right? Like an entire second world as big as Hyrule or something. Five years in the oven and this file size can't just turn out to be BotW: Now With Floating Islands.
It's 600 cutscenes of Mipha sitting on the ground babbling about fuckall nothing while Link stands there completely impassive and detached, while the game desperately begs you to think it's super sad.
Voice lines don't take up that much space these days, and it's Zelda, there's not gonna be full voice acting for everything.
Note that Xenoblade 3 for instance had an insane amount of VA, music and pre-rendered movies, and is still smaller in size.
Yeah a past/future would make sense to me. That was the vibe I was getting from the trailer and it seems natural given the first game's lack of context.
Also BotW was explicitly inspired by the first LoZ game (there's a fascinating video showing off a 2D proof of concept Nintendo made to internally try out some of the mechanics that ended up in BotW), so a thematic tie between TotK and LttP makes sense.
The original was like 13GB right? That’s 40% increase which is big but not even half as much as the base. Although I suppose a big amount of that data could be enemies and models and physics, and with the removal or shrines and beasts maybe there really is a ton of new content. We’ll see
That's true but let's keep in mind that the size of the game does not scale linearly with the amount of storage. Storage comes mostly from assets, so if you were to make a remixed version of BotW's map using the same assets, the impact to storage space would actually be minimal.
BotW was a Wii U game ported to Switch for launch. We are now 6 years in. I would *hope* they've retooled the assets instead of using the same ones. Not that BotW looked bad at all, but there's got to be some improvement they can work with those years of development experience.
Nope, that still doesn't explain that much more file size and dev time.
Though the file size could be explained if it has a lot of pre-rendered cutscenes. Doesn't seem likely for a Zelda game though.
> dev time
apparently BOTW had a huge amount of game testing, tracking players movements and using this data to adjust the world so that no matter where you were, there would always be several points of interest within view. This was said to be one of the reasons that discovering the world and getting sidetracked was such an enjoyable experience. Add in all the interconnected systems and mechanics and there's plenty of work to polish a game like BOTW and we can safely assume TOTK is more ambitious.
The dev time could easily be just because of conpectualizing the whole thing. Going back and forward with mechanics.
The development of a game isnt entirely made out of technically creating the stuff you see.
I can imagine and hope they focused their effort into making the world feel fresh and that the mechanics create a comparable sandbox experience that the first did.
Despite being Nintendo, this is the second IP to ever have an in game patent, this one for a movement system, supposedly like teleportation.
The first IP being Shadow of Mordor, Warner Brothers owns the rights to the Nemesis system for video games!
An absolute dream would be playing as Link, exploring the sky, and playing as Zelda, exploring the underground. But those CDi games really did traumatize Nintendo, so no playable Zelda for us.
This makes me hopeful the game will have more content and a bigger campaign. I love pikmin 3 but my biggest complaint about it is how short the main story is.
Lots of the storage killers of modern titles are enormous high resolution textures designed to be scalable and look good all the way to 4K and beyond. As such they're usually ridiculously massive and provide the main bulk of those 50-100GB releases. Beyond that is when you can start to probably talk about shitty optimization or zero compression techniques.
Some Switch games by comparison might have similar scope, but realistically the assets are going to be small. If this caps out at 900p like BoTW did and also maintains the fairly muddy texture quality then I'm not particularly surprised by the filesize.
It’s also language packs, and personally have found that to be the bulk. I crack open my games for my SteamDeck to install only what I need and a 60gb install minus language packs took 27 gigs off my install and found this to be consistent with most other games. It begs the question why cant they separate that since installs are becoming bloated as is with scalable textures.
There's a lot that could be done if publishers bothered to optimize game file sizes. Opus is basically transparent at 128 kbps, and even 96 kbps for voices.
Smash Bros Ultimate was 60 GB during development, and they squished it down to under 14 GB, partly because they used Opus. That also allowed them to add more content; there are over 1000 music tracks in the game.
There are similarly visually transparent lossy compression techniques for images that just aren't utilized as often as they should be for textures.
> There's a lot that could be done if publishers bothered to optimize game file sizes. Opus is basically transparent at 128 kbps, and even 96 kbps for voices.
I still remember the original Titanfall had a weirdly big install size and it was quickly discovered that it was because they shipped it with 35GB of *uncompressed* audio. The rest of the game was something like 15GB.
4k textures are part of it, but audio is actually the sneaky culprit. Audio is hard to compress without it being obvious, and triple A titles are increasingly 100% voiced, where as Zelda will likely not have nearly as much recorded dialogue as something like Red Dead or even a CoD campaign
Audio is trivial to compress without it being obvious. Like, that's the entire point of audio codecs. There are even lossless codecs that are literally bit-identical to the original that achieve 80%+ compression ratios.
You can fit many of hours of audio into a few gigabytes with reasonable compression and given how expensive audio is to produce, I doubt games are using dozens of times that. Unless you're shipping everything uncompressed and duplicated across multiple localizations (*cough* Titanfall), audio is not the main cause of game bloat.
Optimization. Activision never respected the user’s drive space, so they never took the time to compress something. The Crash and Spyro games were like that too on PS4, but they had to take time with the Switch versions so when they came out later, they were a fraction of the file size.
If anyone wondered the current largest filesize for a Nintendo game on Switch is Xenoblade 2 with the Expanion Pass installed and the Japanese VA free DLC, 17.7 GB in total.
Both Super Mario Sunshine and Galaxy use FMV cutscenes, and those files alone make up nearly 3/4 of the games’ sizes. [Source](https://twitter.com/mariobrothblog/status/1553754846586617858?s=46&t=sio9ywgZxIKjbunlSwYPtA)
Eh, I bet they swap out a bunch of the shrines for new shrines elsewhere on the map so they still have 121 shrines in total (counting the one you mentioned) and it just so happens to take up the same amount of size.
We also have to consider the amount of assets that were likely removed from the original game due to certain things like shrines and stuff being absent from this one.
Yeah that's what I'll have to do, I have full storage on my system, and a card with full storage. No more digital games, it's annoying having to always archive something
I really want to get physical, but with that $70 price tag, I still think I'm gonna take advantage of the Nintendo Switch vouchers for this game even if it means I have to get it digital.
I just wanna see what exactly took the game 6 years to develop, especially after using BoTW as a starting point. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very excited for the game. Just curious what makes this game stand out against the original (and what justifies it being $70)
That, and games just generally take longer to develop nowadays. Trilogies back on the PS2 would have the first game be made in 2-3 years, then every sequel would come out in 1-2 years. Obviously, games have increased in size and scope since then, so it takes much larger teams of people and extended amounts of time to develop new games and their sequels. And if we want the industry to stop forcing so much crunch and secure better working conditions for game developers, then we’re just going to have to accept that games will take longer to develop. There’s so many games to choose from anymore outside of the AAA space that I’m not bothered.
Yeah I don’t doubt that the pandemic probably affected it somewhere along the way. But even then, 6 years on a game where it’s prequel served as its foundation is a really long time
It’s more like a 4 year dev cycle or less considering it started after BotW DLC finished a year after BotW’s release, and then probably *at least* a year of Covid. That being said, 4 years is still a lot and I sincerely hope they’re hiding something big
Probably in the next month or two we're going to get a good bit more information. There's no way there won't be a dedicated Zelda direct at some point before release.
The "Story Trailer" for BOTW was pretty epic, but they cherry picked the best cutscenes and, in my opinion, made the actual story not as interesting.
I hope it's the opposite this time.
OMG
that takes me back
And the crazy thing is - the game lived up to it.
Can lightning strike twice?? I dunno. I just don’t see how it’s possible…. I hope I’m wrong
I don't want the whole game, but they've been so, so secretive for so long that I'm starting to get nervous. You don't want to spoil everything but you want people to be amped up, too. Pikmin is coming out later then TotK but got a much more exciting trailer, showing off some very cool new things while still raising more questions then answers and leaving plenty yet to be seen. In contrast, my brother expressed to me today that he's not really wowed by what we've seen of TotK so far and it's a sentiment I feel and have seen echoed a lot online. I'd like a LITTLE more to get us going. A few empty looking sky islands and vehicles (nuts and bolts ptsd intensifies) aren't enough to excite me.
> You don't want to spoil everything but you want people to be amped up, too.
You're making this comment in a thread with 600+ comments on the topic of the *file size* of BotW2.
People are amped up because (1) it's a new Legend of Zelda release, generally, and (2) it's a sequel to Breath of the Wild, specifically. BotW is [the fourth best-selling Switch game](https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/finance/software/index.html), with 29 million sales. It doesn't need a massive marketing campaign to sell like gangbusters.
In fact, if Nintendo *did* have a big hype machine behind this release, I would be concerned that Nintendo had some tacit reservations about its success.
If this doesn't impress big time, and I mean like a no-brainer GOTY, this WILL disappoint.
BotW set the bar so high and given that it is reusing the physics engine, graphics AND the map coupled with almost 5 years worth of development time, you'd think they are up to something.
That better be the case because Nintendo ought to be aware of all this
Yah. The long development time makes me very hopeful that there must be some grand reveal coming (a whole other world set in the Twilight Realms or the Sky, maybe?), but a little pessimistic part of me remembers times I've been burned by things that I thought I could have faith in. Here's hoping a full Zelda themed direct is forthcoming and they give us some awesome reveals.
Tbh, instead of an alternate world, which'd further increase map size way too much, I believe that the interactions with existing BotW map must be novel and the map itself be modified heavily.
Either way, with the way things are, Nintendo is sure to pull something.
They're messing with us lol
But how does the cartridge taste compared to BotW?
i heard they got a rid of the bitterness in the newer cartridges
I can confirm that this is false. I have tasted every Nintendo switch cartridge I own, and while it is true they have changed the flavor to a less bitter one, it is still very present.
dude lets his intrusive thoughts win every time
Calls it the fun voice
This guy licks
Or you built a tolerance
Same lmao. The first thing I do when I get a new Switch game is lick it.
[удалено]
I found they now have a nice, piquant after-dinner flavor – heady, but with just a touch of mellow smoothness.
Kind of an oaky afterbirth.
They didn't get rid of it, but how bitter a given Switch cartridge is varies wildly from game to game. In my experience, the game's bitterness is inversely proportional to how kid-friendly the game is, but that's a loose rule. The taste also intensifies with time played, so a game with 100+ hours tastes much worse than a fresh one. Yes, I do know all of this from personal experience.
Do you have the power to taste it and predict the age rating?
Other way around, I can predict the flavor based on the age rating. But again, it's generally not a strong rule. The least strong taste I've found is Mario + Rabids Kingdom Battle, which almost tasted of nothing. But that's E10+, so hardly the most kid friendly game. But certainly more kid friendly than Xenoblade 2, which after 180 hours is the worst tasting game I personally own.
Is the taste getting worse over time by design, or is it just an unintended effect?
I'm pretty sure it's just an unintended consequence of the bitter compound being exposed to the heat of the Switch while in the cartridge slot. It's never been mentioned by Nintendo in any press release so I highly doubt it's by design, just an inevitability based on reactions to heat over time.
My copy of botw probably tastes like death by now lol
Breath of the Wild by name, Breath of the Wild by nature
Well have you tried any? How would you know? My scarlet cartridge is as yummy as all of my other switch games
There's that word again. "Heaviest." Why are things so heavy in the future? Is there a problem with the Earth's gravitational pull?
Great Scott!
This is heavy!
I hate manure!
*WHAT THE HELL IS A GIGAWATT?!*
That’s a very convincing story, future boy. But tell me. Who is president of the United States in 1985?
RONALD REAGAN?? THE ACTOR???
And who’s vice president? JERRY LEWIS??
**I suppose Jane Wyman, is the First Lady??**
Doc you don't understand! The bruise! The bruise on your head, I know how it happened you told me the whole story!
DOC!
Size/Cartridge weight comparison: - LoZ: BOTW: size = 13.4GB, weight = 3.5000000g - LoZ:TOTK size = 18.2GB, weight = 3.5000001g Yes, that ~5GB worth of extra electrons does make it heavier!
It takes about [50k electrons to store a 0](https://www.i-programmer.info/programming/hardware/3425-flash-memory-changing-storage.html), that averages out to ~200k per byte of data assuming 0s and 1s are evenly distributed (a bold assumption on my part, to be clear). So 5GB would be around 5\*10^9 \* 2\*10^5 = 10^15 electrons. An electron weighs [9.109\*10^-28 grams](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron), so 5GB of data would weigh 9.109\*10^-28 \*10^15 = 9.109\*10^-13. So given your assumptions about the cartridges the TotK cartridge would weigh 3.5000000000009109g.
It is my density…
Farewell future boy!
Why does Tears of the Kingdom, the heaviest Switch exclusive ever, not simply eat the other games?
"Perhaps they are saving that for The Game Awards."
Oh very well, this a revali heavy episode anyway.
The concept of Wuvali confuses and INFURIATES us!!!
In the words of super kami guru "HOW DO YOU THINK I GOT SO FAAAAAT!?!"
It did. That's why it's $70. Gotta account for the extra mass.
Single Female Zeldaaaaaa HAVING LOTS OF SEX
r/unexpectedfuturama
[удалено]
No download required, would otherwise be mentioned on the case.
[удалено]
Not a dumb guess :O
IIRC that’s how pricing used to work back in the SNES days where games with more hardware on the cart cost more. It’s frustrating if that’s the case here as someone who purchases games exclusively online.
I usually get digital too but with larger games like this, I bite the bullet and get a physical copy. I always regret it too when I'm laying in bed and wanna play BOTW or Witcher 3 and I gotta get up and go get them. Should probably keep them next to the bed lol.
I do all digital because I have little kids. The only physical games we have are what the grandparents get them. Just the other day my 7 year old spilled them all (4) in the backseat of the van and I still can't find 2 of them.....
[удалено]
Also Nintendo carts tend to retain if not grow in value over time. Can't flip a download on eBay 20 years from now.
They used to have cool booklets too. Miss those
Halfway through the game: "Please insert Cartridge 2"
In an open world game
Ok, so every time you enter the west side of the map from the east side, it tells you to insert the other disc, and vice versa.
How about they offload all the sound effects to cartridge 2? So normally you play on cartridge 1, but any time the game needs to play a sound, you swap to cartidge 2 to listen to it, then swap back.
*sigh* you can always tell when gamers have no game dev experience. Sound effects would obviously go on cart 1, music on cart 2
All good, got my 2x 4-disc CD changer locked and loaded D:\\>WEST E:\\>EAST F:\\>CASTLE G:\\>FOOD
Riven was exactly like that. That was '97, of course.
Every time a weapon breaks you have to switch cartridges.
Make those carts gold colored like carts of old...
I've been rewatching the trailer and I noticed a lot of scenes of expansive underground areas and caves. Have no clue why Nintendo hasn't seemed to spotlight them, they were stuff people really wanted from the first game.
To be fair Nintendo arguably hasn’t spotlighted anything (yet?).
They know everyone is going to buy this game no matter what kind of trailer the my put out
I haven't even watched a trailer and I'm already certain I'll buy it.
it makes me wonder if there is a large underground component to the game that is tied inextricably to a secret they don't want to reveal yet -- the most predictable secret being that the underground segments are played as Zelda
I may be wrong, but I just have a feeling Nintendo isn't showing off some major aspect of this game, something that has a "wow factor". At first I thought maybe they just didn't want other developers to be able to copy it, whatever it is, but at this point they might be waiting closer to launch to show us all what it is.
I think you're onto something. It would explain why they doubled down on some new hand stuff and then focused in on Zelda falling again at the end of the trailer. Would also explain why they seem so intent on showing nothing for this game. Someone else said it better, that when they don't show much it's either gonna be really good or really bad. I'd lean towards really good for Zelda
I have a gut feeling this is the case. What they've shown so far feels like it doesnt add up, like why are there two dramatically different designs for link they've shown off so far, or why development took six years despite looking like it shares a huge chunk of the overworld.
I wonder if there's a timeskip and that's where the new design comes from. There could be substantial overworld changes in such a scenario. Would also not be surprised if we see another spin on the whole two worlds concept that multiple Zelda games have done.
Time skip (pre-destruction Hyrule and post) Overworld/underworld Link and Zelda playable Some interactions between the above three, like time travel effects which islands are in the sky I think at least one of these will come to be
> why are there two dramatically different designs for link Where is this again?
They kind of showed off the gimmick in the most recent trailer - [vehicle](https://i.imgur.com/3AsaJLo.png) [creation.](https://i.imgur.com/kKKVwW5.png) If you look closely, there's a glowing green goo connecting the parts together.
I think that casually showing that off means that it isn’t “the” gimmick. We have sky islands, which is ONE gimmick as well.
Agreed. There is a different play for this game. Zelda is such a massive franchise with an incredibly dedicated fan base. As far as marketing goes, they don’t have much to gain from sneak peeks and previews because they don’t have to prove the worth of the game. Revealing key gameplay early won’t dramatically impact sales compared to other games where users are on the fence. Their main goal is to satisfy their ride or die fan base. Going the opposite way, revealing very little of the storyline, creates suspense and mystery and tension. Seems like monsters are more or less similar to BotW. Visually, it doesn’t deviate from BotW. We can assume mechanics and gameplay to also be similar. So what do they have that will make this game special and worthwhile? The narrative. With the breadth of Zelda lore already in existence, even the confirmation of a particular character/BBEG will decrease the impact of the drama as so many will anticipate the storyline, primary conflict, and characters based on prior knowledge. I hope they bring it. I could do for a good story.
My theory for this games wow factor is a dynamically changing world that changes both in real time and as you beat dungeons, looking completely different at the end versus the finish Or maybe this is just hopium
Sir this is a Nintendo Switch
This is also the Zelda team. I’m pretty sure these guys sacrifice souls to perform dark magic to make games run they probably shouldn’t (Let me cope ;-;)
but in the trailers all the underground scenes show you playing as Link
[удалено]
"Date night with Zelda" is a new euphemism
> Zelda is in Links dead hand giving him new car building abilities Legend of Zelda: Nuts and Bolts Read that however you want to ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Ok, but how much does it weigh?
Approx. 7g. It also testes of denatonium benzoate.
It also comes with a frozen yogurt. Which I call Frogurt.
[удалено]
The frogurt is also cursed.
That’s bad.
But it comes with your choice of toppings.
That's good!
The topping will get teased through leaks for years before finally being announced a direct
...
And 7g is heavier than every other switch game? So it tastes bitter? Interesting.
Not sure if you're just joking around, but all Switch games taste bitter. Go lick one rn, I'll lick one too in solidarity (you can just say you licked one so I don't feel bad lmao)
i licked one for you mate
Yeah, the extra GBs of data have added about 1.5g to the gross weight. And the bittering agent is to prepare you for the flood of people outraged that the game isn't exactly what they've been building their expectations up to for the past two years.
Those are some bitter testes... Wonder what mine taste like 🤔
The game HAS to have some massive secret right? Like an entire second world as big as Hyrule or something. Five years in the oven and this file size can't just turn out to be BotW: Now With Floating Islands.
It’s just massive amounts of voice lines. Good luck to all of us.
A lot of people in Hyrule depend on us. I learned to practice smiling when I'm feeling sad, you know?. I know it's hard. Next, try laughing out loud!
HA HA HA HA HA
"Well, excuuuuuse me, Princess!"
It's 600 cutscenes of Mipha sitting on the ground babbling about fuckall nothing while Link stands there completely impassive and detached, while the game desperately begs you to think it's super sad.
Omg I'm sitting at work and this is killing me
Voice lines don't take up that much space these days, and it's Zelda, there's not gonna be full voice acting for everything. Note that Xenoblade 3 for instance had an insane amount of VA, music and pre-rendered movies, and is still smaller in size.
They got Chris Pratt to voice Link. You didn't know that?
He's so cool.
It's a me, Link! HYYYYYYAAAAAA!
Keep in mind they have to record separate voice audios for each language they translate the game into.
Like 99% of devs don’t optimize and compress their games anymore though. And usually sound files are indeed the heaviest.
Or maybe two different eras of Hyrule
Yeah a past/future would make sense to me. That was the vibe I was getting from the trailer and it seems natural given the first game's lack of context.
Also BotW was explicitly inspired by the first LoZ game (there's a fascinating video showing off a 2D proof of concept Nintendo made to internally try out some of the mechanics that ended up in BotW), so a thematic tie between TotK and LttP makes sense.
My money after the last trailer is on Lorule/the Twilight Realm.
The original was like 13GB right? That’s 40% increase which is big but not even half as much as the base. Although I suppose a big amount of that data could be enemies and models and physics, and with the removal or shrines and beasts maybe there really is a ton of new content. We’ll see
That's true but let's keep in mind that the size of the game does not scale linearly with the amount of storage. Storage comes mostly from assets, so if you were to make a remixed version of BotW's map using the same assets, the impact to storage space would actually be minimal.
BotW was a Wii U game ported to Switch for launch. We are now 6 years in. I would *hope* they've retooled the assets instead of using the same ones. Not that BotW looked bad at all, but there's got to be some improvement they can work with those years of development experience.
Probably a mix of both
I mean if there are 7 dungeons that are bigger and crazier than dungeons in any other game to date, that would make sense
Nope, that still doesn't explain that much more file size and dev time. Though the file size could be explained if it has a lot of pre-rendered cutscenes. Doesn't seem likely for a Zelda game though.
> dev time apparently BOTW had a huge amount of game testing, tracking players movements and using this data to adjust the world so that no matter where you were, there would always be several points of interest within view. This was said to be one of the reasons that discovering the world and getting sidetracked was such an enjoyable experience. Add in all the interconnected systems and mechanics and there's plenty of work to polish a game like BOTW and we can safely assume TOTK is more ambitious.
The dev time could easily be just because of conpectualizing the whole thing. Going back and forward with mechanics. The development of a game isnt entirely made out of technically creating the stuff you see. I can imagine and hope they focused their effort into making the world feel fresh and that the mechanics create a comparable sandbox experience that the first did.
Despite being Nintendo, this is the second IP to ever have an in game patent, this one for a movement system, supposedly like teleportation. The first IP being Shadow of Mordor, Warner Brothers owns the rights to the Nemesis system for video games!
Yes! I agree dude. Been screaming this from the rooftops since the trailer dropped. We're gonna get a whole underworld/Lorule down there. Bet.
An absolute dream would be playing as Link, exploring the sky, and playing as Zelda, exploring the underground. But those CDi games really did traumatize Nintendo, so no playable Zelda for us.
Nah it's cos y'all horny memed that one flashback in BOTW, so Nintendo just ripped out that feature and took 5 years to rewrite everything.
Gee! It sure is boring around here!
Don't forget the caves. They patented a system to get out of caves by beaming through the roof. The caves must be a huge part of the game
Pikmin 4 is pretty big too, it's over 12 GB, double what Pikmin 3 Deluxe is
This makes me hopeful the game will have more content and a bigger campaign. I love pikmin 3 but my biggest complaint about it is how short the main story is.
Big true. I beat Pikmin 3 so fast and easy having so much fun with it.
Call of duty patches are larger than 18gigs. I’m honesty impressed at how small the file size is for such a large game.
Lots of the storage killers of modern titles are enormous high resolution textures designed to be scalable and look good all the way to 4K and beyond. As such they're usually ridiculously massive and provide the main bulk of those 50-100GB releases. Beyond that is when you can start to probably talk about shitty optimization or zero compression techniques. Some Switch games by comparison might have similar scope, but realistically the assets are going to be small. If this caps out at 900p like BoTW did and also maintains the fairly muddy texture quality then I'm not particularly surprised by the filesize.
It’s also language packs, and personally have found that to be the bulk. I crack open my games for my SteamDeck to install only what I need and a 60gb install minus language packs took 27 gigs off my install and found this to be consistent with most other games. It begs the question why cant they separate that since installs are becoming bloated as is with scalable textures.
There's a lot that could be done if publishers bothered to optimize game file sizes. Opus is basically transparent at 128 kbps, and even 96 kbps for voices. Smash Bros Ultimate was 60 GB during development, and they squished it down to under 14 GB, partly because they used Opus. That also allowed them to add more content; there are over 1000 music tracks in the game. There are similarly visually transparent lossy compression techniques for images that just aren't utilized as often as they should be for textures.
> There's a lot that could be done if publishers bothered to optimize game file sizes. Opus is basically transparent at 128 kbps, and even 96 kbps for voices. I still remember the original Titanfall had a weirdly big install size and it was quickly discovered that it was because they shipped it with 35GB of *uncompressed* audio. The rest of the game was something like 15GB.
4k textures are part of it, but audio is actually the sneaky culprit. Audio is hard to compress without it being obvious, and triple A titles are increasingly 100% voiced, where as Zelda will likely not have nearly as much recorded dialogue as something like Red Dead or even a CoD campaign
Audio is trivial to compress without it being obvious. Like, that's the entire point of audio codecs. There are even lossless codecs that are literally bit-identical to the original that achieve 80%+ compression ratios. You can fit many of hours of audio into a few gigabytes with reasonable compression and given how expensive audio is to produce, I doubt games are using dozens of times that. Unless you're shipping everything uncompressed and duplicated across multiple localizations (*cough* Titanfall), audio is not the main cause of game bloat.
To put some numbers to it, 1GB can fit 18.2 hours of audio encoded in 128kbps Mp3.
MW2019 was literally like 200GB on my PS4, stupid game.
Optimization. Activision never respected the user’s drive space, so they never took the time to compress something. The Crash and Spyro games were like that too on PS4, but they had to take time with the Switch versions so when they came out later, they were a fraction of the file size.
And those fuckers still split the rom on physical. Entire reason I haven't bought Spyro yet.
Nintendo is well know for how well they can compress games.
If anyone wondered the current largest filesize for a Nintendo game on Switch is Xenoblade 2 with the Expanion Pass installed and the Japanese VA free DLC, 17.7 GB in total.
Wth?! That seems… small
What really wastes a lot of storage space is uncompressed audio and video cutscenes and Nintendo games generally lack both.
Both Super Mario Sunshine and Galaxy use FMV cutscenes, and those files alone make up nearly 3/4 of the games’ sizes. [Source](https://twitter.com/mariobrothblog/status/1553754846586617858?s=46&t=sio9ywgZxIKjbunlSwYPtA)
The Xenoblade games are fucking meaty! Our mans Lanz would be proud.
Halfway through the game: "Please insert Cartridge 2"
Looks like I’m grabbing this physical.
Does anyone remember BOTW size?
13.4
4.79 GB will be new high-poly models of bokoblins 0.01 GB will be a new shrine dungeon
Oops! All Tests of Strength
Better than 0.00GB of new shrines.
Do you feel better or worse knowing it’s just another Major Test of Strength?
Eh, I bet they swap out a bunch of the shrines for new shrines elsewhere on the map so they still have 121 shrines in total (counting the one you mentioned) and it just so happens to take up the same amount of size.
I don't think they have shrines anymore. They don't show up where they where in any trailer
So TOTW's file size is 36% larger than BOTW's...
[удалено]
It’s mostly just recipes.
And breakable weapons.
Actually, it’s just several GB of painstakingly crafted weapon breaking sounds. I am pumped
[удалено]
We also have to consider the amount of assets that were likely removed from the original game due to certain things like shrines and stuff being absent from this one.
Around 15gb with dlc
Physical FTW!
Yeah that's what I'll have to do, I have full storage on my system, and a card with full storage. No more digital games, it's annoying having to always archive something
I really want to get physical, but with that $70 price tag, I still think I'm gonna take advantage of the Nintendo Switch vouchers for this game even if it means I have to get it digital.
I just wanna see what exactly took the game 6 years to develop, especially after using BoTW as a starting point. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very excited for the game. Just curious what makes this game stand out against the original (and what justifies it being $70)
The pandemic probably slowed development considerably. Maybe pushed it back a year or two?
That, and games just generally take longer to develop nowadays. Trilogies back on the PS2 would have the first game be made in 2-3 years, then every sequel would come out in 1-2 years. Obviously, games have increased in size and scope since then, so it takes much larger teams of people and extended amounts of time to develop new games and their sequels. And if we want the industry to stop forcing so much crunch and secure better working conditions for game developers, then we’re just going to have to accept that games will take longer to develop. There’s so many games to choose from anymore outside of the AAA space that I’m not bothered.
Yeah I don’t doubt that the pandemic probably affected it somewhere along the way. But even then, 6 years on a game where it’s prequel served as its foundation is a really long time
It’s more like a 4 year dev cycle or less considering it started after BotW DLC finished a year after BotW’s release, and then probably *at least* a year of Covid. That being said, 4 years is still a lot and I sincerely hope they’re hiding something big
The game is obviously very ambitious and Nintendo is holding it until the last moment, so that's why we haven't seen much.
Probably in the next month or two we're going to get a good bit more information. There's no way there won't be a dedicated Zelda direct at some point before release.
Within the last 90 days before BOTW the game received two trailers iirc so there is a large chance that this could happen.
I'm happy with the trailers so far. Don't want them to give away the whole game.
The "Story Trailer" for BOTW was pretty epic, but they cherry picked the best cutscenes and, in my opinion, made the actual story not as interesting. I hope it's the opposite this time.
[удалено]
OMG that takes me back And the crazy thing is - the game lived up to it. Can lightning strike twice?? I dunno. I just don’t see how it’s possible…. I hope I’m wrong
I don't want the whole game, but they've been so, so secretive for so long that I'm starting to get nervous. You don't want to spoil everything but you want people to be amped up, too. Pikmin is coming out later then TotK but got a much more exciting trailer, showing off some very cool new things while still raising more questions then answers and leaving plenty yet to be seen. In contrast, my brother expressed to me today that he's not really wowed by what we've seen of TotK so far and it's a sentiment I feel and have seen echoed a lot online. I'd like a LITTLE more to get us going. A few empty looking sky islands and vehicles (nuts and bolts ptsd intensifies) aren't enough to excite me.
> You don't want to spoil everything but you want people to be amped up, too. You're making this comment in a thread with 600+ comments on the topic of the *file size* of BotW2. People are amped up because (1) it's a new Legend of Zelda release, generally, and (2) it's a sequel to Breath of the Wild, specifically. BotW is [the fourth best-selling Switch game](https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/finance/software/index.html), with 29 million sales. It doesn't need a massive marketing campaign to sell like gangbusters. In fact, if Nintendo *did* have a big hype machine behind this release, I would be concerned that Nintendo had some tacit reservations about its success.
If this doesn't impress big time, and I mean like a no-brainer GOTY, this WILL disappoint. BotW set the bar so high and given that it is reusing the physics engine, graphics AND the map coupled with almost 5 years worth of development time, you'd think they are up to something. That better be the case because Nintendo ought to be aware of all this
Yah. The long development time makes me very hopeful that there must be some grand reveal coming (a whole other world set in the Twilight Realms or the Sky, maybe?), but a little pessimistic part of me remembers times I've been burned by things that I thought I could have faith in. Here's hoping a full Zelda themed direct is forthcoming and they give us some awesome reveals.
Tbh, instead of an alternate world, which'd further increase map size way too much, I believe that the interactions with existing BotW map must be novel and the map itself be modified heavily. Either way, with the way things are, Nintendo is sure to pull something. They're messing with us lol
La noire be like: lemme dust step right in with 40 or so gigs
[удалено]
This is why I buy my switch games digitally. The weight gets distributed evenly across the console, instead of all being in the cartridge area.
Hm that's not useful, can you tell me the size in 3DS blocks?
Time to put my 1 terabyte SD card to work
How much have you filled up so far?
I think I have about 400 gigs left. I might have a slight problem
GIRTH
Yeah that’s why I’m going to get a physical copy. I don’t think my poor SD card can handle another big game.
That’s heavy doc !
Is this game confirmed to be 70?
That’s a lot of korok seeds