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My son asks me literally every other day if there is a release date for this yet.

No usual small release discount and performance issues means this has gone from a must but to a wait and see for me. A shame as it looks so good.

New Star GP on March 7th, hope this one gets some love as it's superb on Steam and if there is one thing the Switch could do with, it's more decent driving games.

My son is beside himself with excitement that Little Kitty, Big City might have a release date announced.

Some here could do with that kinda positivity.

The drop is negligible, and it's from a record high. The long term plot of the share price still makes for a very strong trend upwards.

It's a nonsense story, people aren't 'offloading their shares' as some have misread this.

Q1 2025 (if it is then) is still within the financial year, and gives them time and space for a far smoother launch than pre-Christmas '24 would ever have been.

@Zeebor15 they've actually undersold the sale, there are hundreds upon hundreds of games that are discounted by 90% or more.

@Joeynator3000 they've already had a big sale, I think it ended last week

Cuphead, Oxenfree, Hollow Knight, Celeste, art of rally and Undertale make up my wish list, my wallet breathed a sigh of relief as still none of those have gone on sale this year.

Which is seriously impressive when you consider the very stingy restriction on the amount of stuff you can save and download within the game on the Switch, and also how shockingly poor the marketplace is in terms of loading.

Print quality and paper a little iffy in ours given the high quality of the hard binding. Some of the pictures towards the back of the book (of the monsters) are very green.

Worth noting that it doesn't list every Korok location (at least as far as I've noticed).

@Ryu_Niiyama Micro Machines did it 30 years ago!

@Pachrisu I was just about to post exactly this, Nintendo/TotK are massively inflation busting given the RRP is identical to it's predecessor so 6 years ago.

Video game prices are massively below what they were in the 90s, inflation adjusted.

The names of the Lightroots are the names of the correlating shrines backwards.

Also, ZL with Ultrahand? Damnit, didn't know that.

I imagine the bar is pretty darn low in June to enter the boxed sales chart at number 40. Still impressive and I'd love the Evercade to continue doing well, but it's more than likely not quite as spectacular as it sounds!

@puddinggirl interesting sleep fact...there is no such thing as 'catching up with sleep', particularly when we're talking in terms of multiple days of lost sleep.

He's one of the many reasons a quick 2 minute dash over to a shrine I've spotted becomes a 30 minute distraction. Before I know it I've fixed his sign, explored a new cave and done 5 other things that have absolutely nothing to do with what I was planning to do.

Absolutely love it. In terms of optimum 'have some fun before hitting the story hard' I'd strongly recommend the following...

1. The Rito strand of the 4 Regional adventures (it's easy, has an excellent reward and is the games internal trigger for unlocking/setting in place a lot of stuff)

2. Do everything for Robbie.

With those two things done you can enjoy pretty much everything without needing to progress further through the main game at all. Combined they offer significant quality of life improvements too.

@Dman10 I would say, particularly out in the world, that you can pretty much get by without building much more than the occasional raft or just needing to attach a couple of bits for story progression (such as balloons). My son hasn't built a thing other than a couple of required and very basic things and he's just finished the 3rd of 4 major story components and has retrieved a famous weapon.

Shrines are a little trickier, but if you pick and choose there are still more than enough to accrue decent hearts and stamina without needing to do any serious building.

One of the issues people raise with superhero movies is that sometimes they forget they have certain powers. I don't think that's a plot hole, as I've already done that about 4 times today! It's usually ascend that I forget is even there.

Unless there are some serious exploit/glitches found it's hard to see how it will go much under an hour for a while, the unskippable opening scenes and essential tasks take a while before you even get going really.

@jump it shows massive confidence in the product and the word of mouth that early adopters are going to put out there.

Pretty rare in gaming (or indeed movie trailers) these days and there are very, very few brands that can get away with it.

@FawfulsFury Nintendo play the long game and software sales for first party titles have unbelievably long tails, so there is no need to 'spoil' everything to market something like TotK which is going to sell in silly numbers to those who would have 100% bought this regardless.

If person X discovers the game has X, Y or Z one month before the game releases or two days after, it doesn't really matter.

I'm guessing if this follows anything like the curve of BotW this is going to be insanely popular on YouTube etc, you can't buy that sort of word of mouth.

@Chaotic_Neutral randomly and with no warning in a completely unrelated TotK article.

This article is information from Nintendo themselves, and is flagged by SPOILERS (twice), once in bold, and an image to break up the page so you don't accidently read it when opening the article.

@Chaotic_Neutral that's some fairly heavy spoilers you've just dropped in there, thanks for that.

The article seems to leave room for doubt that people are playing it now, but it's 100% certain that many, many people have been playing it for at least 3 days now.

We stumbled across an 90 minute video on YT (quickly ignored, but it was clearly actual gameplay) and Kotaku have even gone in-depth with links to all the detail you could ever want (one particular forum post is over 100 pages of a bunch of people speed running the game, there are hundreds of screenshots).

"Tears of the Kingdom's price will also be bumped up by $10 - raising it to $69.99 USD (or the regional equivalent)."

At this point this must surely be intentionally misleading to generate clicks and engagement?! A higher tier has been in existence since the Switch was released in many/most territories, the US is now just falling into line. BotW (and Smash Bros) are the only titles prior to TotK to have been at the higher pricing tier.

@Zequio I'm genuinely intrigued in the 'just a DLC' comment...in what way?

Yes it's Hyrule, but if anything this trailer shows it's way, waaaay more than that.

More importantly, the Fuse mechanic detailed in the gameplay video is an almost-entire rewrite of vast parts of the game engine alone. I can't even begin to imagine mapping out all the weapon, shield and vehicle combos and ensuring they all work, it's an absolutely insane undertaking in a game the size of BotW.

I can't comprehend anyone still truly believing that this is just a bolt-on to BotW that took 6 years to make. Mind boggling.

My 8 year old pointed out that the Zelda looking thing seems a lot like the paintings/carvings from the first trailer.

@RareFan I'm sure they have data on when most people buy/pre-order and when the best time to drop things like this is.

If people were not fussed after the first trailer, surely this would pull them back in? And at a time when you can actually place an order for the game, so win-win.

Remarkably reserved build up to this game given we only have a 3 minute trailer to go before release. I'm all for that, even having watched everything it's likely most of us will go into this game having very little idea what's about to happen (unless the 3 minutes completely blow the lid off the story).

Nintendo seem very, very confident in their product.

@NintendoWife it says the UK and EU in the header and article. It was spotted on the UK site first, understandable on an English language site, and these days they need to be mentioned separately from the EU as I'm sure you're away, they aren't part of it.

Funny you mention this though as they specifically glossed over the UK pricing when the whole £10/$10 extra for TotK kerfuffle happened. The UK (and I'm sure, some other territories) has ALWAYS (since BotW) had an additional pricing tier for the biggest titles, it all only kicked off because the US finally caught up with that.

Nothing has really changed, in the UK and EU Nintendo have always been effectively obliged to fix or replace as we have incredibly powerful and far reaching consumer protections laws. I've had ours fixed twice well outside of any stated warranty or otherwise, mention 'not fit for purpose' and they won't even attempt to challenge you (because, quite frankly, they can't).

It's good that this is now made obvious, but I don't think the actual policy has changed, simply because it can't.

Happens frequently, even global mega releases such as Avengers End Game had a slightly staggered release.

Can often be down to small things like local holidays.

@blindsquarel not that black and white though, is it?

We own BotW on the Switch (and the amiibos, and the big BotW book, in fact I dread to think how much we've spent on BotW!)

We also have BotW Second Wind running on the Steam Deck (beautifully, I might add).

My son only discovered Zelda through YouTubers like The Basement and A-Game playing modded BoTW. We've not cost Nintendo a penny by putting BotW on our Steam Deck, we've already spent pretty much every penny there is to be spent on BoTW officially, and you can bet we will be doing that again when Tears of the Kingdom comes out (my son is already saving up for whichever uber expensive special edition comes out).

Is anyone going to actively avoid trailers/news in the run up to release?

I avoid movie trailers and it's amazing watching them 'blind', especially as trailers give away so much.

Imagine firing Tears of the Kingdom up with no knowledge other than the first two trailers (so, basically nothing apart from sky islands and some new abilities), everything being 100% fresh and a surprise at every turn.

Need to be realistic when thinking about this and consider that many popular titles will now be in licensing hell and all bets are off for third party titles.

In terms of getting a load of key games out there which on the face of it are do-able from a legal perspective, the Master System would be a home run. Loads of first party and/or non-licenced properties which they could fill it with, many of which have barely seen the light of day since original release.

Just to get started:

Psycho Fox (obviously)
Sonic / Sonic 2 / Sonic Chaos
Fantasy Zone / II
Golden Axe Warrior
Kenseiden
Alex Kidd in Miracle World
After Burner
Phantasy Star

It's been a huge hit and it's a surprisingly relaxing experience. I've had a Steam Deck for a few months and this is second only to Vampire Survivors as my most played games on the thing.

Breath of the Wild 2 is Spring 2023, isn't it? This direct is primarily focused on winter releases.

They are sugar coating it a bit by referencing FIFA 22, as this is actually FIFA 19 with roster updates.

@Joeynator3000 Nintendo will have precise data on the usage of each online store, it's not done randomly.

Given the userbase of the Wii vs the Wii U, for example (and the explosion of the Wii again at the start of the pandemic) it wouldn't surprise me at all if the Wii shop is significantly busier in terms of daily traffic than the Wii U shop.

@Ade117 21st March I believe.

@nessisonett not at all, it's part of the contract negotiation, which will be completely separate from the poster design itself.

It's why you often see names across the top out of sync with the order of the faces on the poster, as even the position (billing) of the names is part of the negotiation.

It's nice that they've updated it here, but it's an awkward precedent to set.

Sadly, 'get the Minecraft store working on Switch' is missing again.

I think we've got on it once or twice, reliably, since Christmas.

Live a Live is the game I never knew existed that I now must have, properly wowed by that. I'm not even an RPG fan.

In the UK, at least, they appear to have split the Character Packs, meaning it's not possible to order all the content.

There are 7 DLCs, in the US and other territories all 7 DLCs come with the Deluxe version.

In the UK, only 6 DLCs come with the Deluxe. Amazon have exclusivity on the Classic Character Pack.

Amazon don't sell a Deluxe + Exclusive version. So you either have to have 1 DLC or 6 DLCs.

Hopefully it's possible to upgrade to the Deluxe version digitally, in which case in terms of acquiring all the content, at this stage it's best to buy the Amazon exclusive version, then upgrade later.

Having endured the Minecraft marketplace on Switch on a regular basis, I'm stunned that Microsoft/Mojang are seemingly content with just leaving it largely broken for a game that is selling so incredibly well on one system.

Our workaround in the end was to fire up the Android version, log in to the same account, buy stuff, then (eventually, after many attempts) download it on the Switch version.

This looks rather lovely and I'm impressed that what appears to be a lot of love and effort has gone into a game which, presumably, very few people are ever going to play.

My wife is Norwegian and I've never heard of Pinchcliffe!

Ordered Dread last night, arrived at 9am this morning

For £30 even if I hate it I won't lose a penny.

The splash screen has appeared on my Switch with all the games that are in the sale, but the prices don't appear to have actually been discounted yet!

@Supadav03 why do they need a deeper discount? BotW still shifts at a very high price at retail, in fact used copies go for only a little less.

If you're willing to buy physical and sell your games on after you've finished them, Switch first party gaming is cheaper than game rentals ever were.

The Crash Junctions in Burnout 2 on the Gamecube are my favourite gaming memories full stop.

I've chased that thrill ever since and never found it. Given it's a dead simple concept I'm kinda stunned that nobody has properly replicated that mechanic and scoring in a modern game. The best bit about the GC version (aside from the additional crash junctions) was the instant load times, which meant replaying the same level over and over never felt like a pain.