Why AM radio and Ethernet still matter, and why Zelda keeps winning

25:53So they're intimately related. They really are. Is there a bandwidth limit? Is there like a bandwidth minimum, I would say? A minimum. That's a good question. I think that we have some fundamental laws of physics. You know, when you hear about what they were doing at 2.94 megabits per second and 340 nanoseconds, today we're broadcasting, you know, 100 gigabits, soon 200 gigabits per second. We're measuring the light pulses. If you could see them, they would be that long. They would be picoseconds. So there are some fundamental limits. We're actually fundamentally limited in terms of the distances we can travel.

26:31And the faster we go, the shorter distances we can travel on copper, for example. Right. Okay. Another question that was asked was how close are we to terabit ethernet with just one lane? With just one lane. That's a tricky question. So we can do it today. But what Bob said on top of that is we have to do it with one lambda. So one of the ways that we can communicate more, we do something called amplitude. You send not just a one and a zero, we send two bits or four bits. So we have something called PAM4. But with light, we can do something really interesting. We can actually send different wavelengths down the same fiber.

27:13And when we do that, if you do CWDM, you have four. So if we could get to 250 gigabits, we're right on the edge of that. For Lambda, that's a terabit on one fiber. So that's pretty close. That's cool. It's easy to look ahead the next 50 years and say that speeds are going to get faster and faster because we're always improving speeds. Originally, Bob was saying that we went to 3 megabits was like 10 ,000 times faster than what you had before. Or if we're talking about eventually 1.2 terabit per second, then we've got 100 times 1 ,000 faster than we're getting close to 100 times 1 ,000 faster than that.

27:50What happens when that network actually proliferates? We see those speeds in very small lengths of cable. We see that in the data center. But I want you to paint a picture for us of what connectivity looks like across the country, across the world, as those speeds get that quick. Yeah. So I think what's interesting, even today, before AI, before generative AI, you would do something into a data center through your network connection. And we call that north-south traffic that's going into the data center. And what that would then do is spawn a thousand times more traffic because they're actually holding an auction to advertise to you, to your eyeballs.

28:35They're figuring out everything that you've done. You know, I was looking at I'm going fly fishing. So I was looking at a fly rod. They're going to show me a fly rod because I looked at it yesterday. And so there's a thousand times more traffic going on on that east-west traffic than there is on the north-south. That's going to explode another thousandfold with AI now. The amount of East-West traffic, and on top of that, generative AI is going to be generating really rich content coming back. It's going to be talking. It's going to be visual images. It's going to be generated on the fly. So we're going to need both.

29:10We're going to need the broadband connectivity and then massive amounts of East-West connection inside the data center. Are we getting close to the holodeck with all of that connectivity and all that generative AI behind it? Absolutely. Absolutely. So, you know, today, the digital twin is really part of what is AI. And people think they hear about the metaverse. We talk about the omniverse because we think it's more than just avatars and gaming. It is that. But we're actually going to build digital twins of everything, of human beings. They're using that for robotics and AI when you're actually operating on somebody.

29:47You'll have a CT image that's going to be overlaid on top of somebody that's doing robotic surgery. We're building factories down to the light and all of the robots that are coming in, interacting with humans. You're going to fail in the virtual world quickly so that you can succeed in the real world very, very fast. So don't make your mistakes on a building. Make it on a digital twin of the building. Yeah. And then build the building right. So that's how we are going to avoid things like those those death ray buildings. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Very excited to avoid those melting all the cars.

30:26One of the things we heard a lot of the innovators talk about on stage is the importance of standards and the importance of being able to construct something that works across multiple companies. I don't know if I've heard of a particular standard yet for what the metaverse, what this digital world that NVIDIA wants to make a clone of the real world, how that comes to pass in an open way. Do you know, is that a thing that you see on the horizon that all of these video game companies and technology companies band together around something? And what can you envision for us what that something might be?

31:02Yeah, so I think we're already embracing all kinds of open standards. So if you look at what we call the omniverse, these digital twins, it's actually based on something that came out of the graphics video world, which is a universal scene description. And so you can actually model physical light reflection of metal. You can look at sandpaper. You can look at the weight of things, the friction of things as they're sliding. We model everything down to the real physics so that it's completely accurate. And you have to do that for gaming. That's what it came out of. It turns out it's really useful for doing things like digital cars.

31:39If you're doing a self-driving car, then there's a couple of ways you can get all that data. One way is you drive for millions of hours, collect all the data. The other way is you create a digital twin of the entire Earth. And you train on that data. And you can do weird things that actually might happen once in a while. We had snow in the Bay Area this year. So you can put snow in the middle of the desert. We can create a digital world and train off of that synthetic data. So absolutely, you can do this. And I think we're seeing lots of standards being embraced because if you have an open standard that people can develop on top of, more people will do it.

32:17It grows the ecosystem. We love doing that. Right. So, I mean, NVIDIA is very, very good at the GPU side of things, at the graphics. And what we quickly learned was that GPUs were really good for neural networks. And I think one of the things that Bob talked about was that one of the limitations of AI is these neural networks and what they can do. How do we expand the connectivity there? Yeah, so the thing that's interesting about a neural network is he talked about the limitation being the data, the amount of data. And we had this strange thing happen over the last decade, which was the Internet and the World Wide Web.

32:52And suddenly there's just this massive amount of data that you can actually access. Public domain, go out, scrape the entire data, put it into a data center. It is a massive amount of information. So to train against that, there is no computer in the world that can hold all of the data. I heard when Google started, that was the request that Sergei had. He says, I want a computer that can hold the entire data of the internet. And back then, it was actually almost possible. Today, absolutely not. So if you think about it, we heard earlier, Andy was talking about that when Sun was founded, the network is the computer.

33:29That was the theme of Sun. But those were separate computers that could talk to each other individually. Today, it's not a computer with sheet metal around it. It's the data center is the computer. And the networking that's part of that is part of that computer. So networking is critical to be able to access all of that data that you need to be able to do to do the huge neural networks for large language models. How important is the concept of Ethernet and the concept of the wired connectivity that underpins it going to be to all of us and all the young children that are going to be born and living 50 years in the future?

34:08How much are they going to need to think about that living in a world where they have all the cellular connectivity, They have the 5G will turn into 6G and 7G. And how much of that is a thing that we explain to them is underpinning invisibly behind the scenes? Yeah. So I think there's, I'm old enough. I actually remember the coax cable with those little plugs that you had to put in. I was a freshman in college at Berkeley and I was connecting all of the professor's office with that ethernet. Okay. So I lived this stuff. And I remember I was in Patterson's office, who was one of the pioneers of risk computing, Reduced Inception Set Computing David Patterson.

34:50And I asked him, I said, what is risk? And he looked at me and he said, what is your major? And I said, physics. And he said, you don't need to know. So I connected that. I think over a period of time, people are, you know, you plugged in your network. I think that even with broadband connectivity through wireless, through 5G, I think that plug is going to exist. I think the Cat5 cable, 25 years from now, somebody's still going to be running that Cat cable. I made a mistake when I built my house. I said, you know what? Wireless, we're almost there. It's almost good enough. I'm not going to wire my house with fiber and copper.

35:26I really wish I'd done that because now I've been up in the attic putting the copper back in. Anytime you're trying to download a game to your PS5, you're like, oh, I wish I'd use Powerline to something there. Okay, I want to piggyback off this. You asked about, are we going to have to teach our kids what Ethernet is? How long are we going to still have to teach our kids the difference between an Ethernet cable and a phone cable? Well, I don't think people even know what phone cables are anymore. Ethernet has already outlived PSTN. I have a POTS line at my house just because we have a really hard time to get broadband connectivity.

36:04But I don't think many people know what POTS lines are. I mean, really, I don't think people will be using those jacks anymore. I think that RJ45 for Cat5 cables and Cat10, et cetera, it's going to persist. The other thing that was interesting that Bob said tonight, which I thought was spot on, you know, he said before there's Ethernet and Ethernot. Anything that's not Ethernet is Ethernot. It turns out that even Ethernet is Ethernet. Because he said today, he said that every time that, you know, we completely change the standard, none of the things that are in the CSMA CD that they were talking about, none of that exists anymore.

36:42Everything's point to point. There was no shared media, but they just keep calling it Ethernet. So while I'm saying that Ethernet will be around in 25 years, it's not going to be the same. We see convergences of technology all the time. We do other technologies for networking. What do you think it's going to be? What are those next ones we should be looking at? I think you're going to see a much more intelligent network. So when I talked about, you know, the network is the computer was Sun 1984. Today, the data center is the new unit of computing. When we accelerate things with a GPU, we're talking, you know, Moore's law has slowed down.

37:20It used to double the performance of semiconductors every two years. It's not happening anymore. The speeds of CPUs plateaued a decade ago, but we're doing other things, architectural things to accelerate AI. And as we do that, we've increased over the last decade a million fold the performance of a GPU running AI. All kinds of innovations. Architecture matters again. We can't just rely on semiconductor processing to do that. What's happening when you speed something up a million fold, it turns out that all that networking and communication becomes the bottleneck. The network becomes the bottleneck.

38:00So what I think you'll see in the future is the network become really part of the computing. As all of these different boxes, they're part of the same computer. We are already seeing that you process the data as it's moving through the network. So somebody once said that, you know, how do you speed up a Domino's pizza delivery. Okay. It's easy to make more pizzas. You can buy more pizza ovens, but how do you get it faster than half an hour to the home? Because you take the order, you make the pizza, you put the cheese on it and put it in the oven and then it bakes for 15 minutes. Well, one way you can make things faster is to put the ovens in the truck that's delivering the pizzas.

38:40That's what I think you'll see with ethernet. Are you talking about from one node to the next node so that within your server rack or within your GPU? Or are we talking about beyond that? We're talking about optical internet connects on the chips themselves and things like that. That's happening too. I'm actually talking about data being processed as it's moving through the network. So if your computer is now a bunch of different nodes, you should be able to process with AI networks and neural networks. They do a bunch of work. And then all of the GPUs need to share information to do the next round of work.

39:16And that sharing of information is becoming the bottleneck. So we have huge amounts of bandwidth and the network's becoming really intelligent. The network is literally a computer. So instead of the network as a computer, it really is a computer. I mean, I'm about to say a dirty word, which is Wi-Fi. I feel like it's a dirty word today. And generally, Wi-Fi is great. But Wi-Fi does have a lot of limitations. Does that mean we're going to see maybe less Wi-Fi with this, like the internet is in all these nodes and doing the computation there. Can Wi-Fi keep up with that? Or is it going to kind of be more reliant on?

39:51If Bob were here, I've heard him say it. He would say that Wi-Fi was originally called wireless ethernet. So if we call it wireless ethernet, it's fine. It's fine. It's fine. Okay. It's fine. And, you know, different horses for different courses. In the home, you know, look, I'm connected all the time. I've got multiple devices. I've got Bluetooth connections. I've got Wi-Fi connections and I have wired connections. If only I had a broadband connection, then I'd be really happy. Yeah, let's talk about that because you live in the Bay Area. I do. And you don't have broadband. I have broadband. So, you know, when you look at that access of broadband communication, they talk about a couple of things.

40:34It has to be accessible. It has to be affordable. And then it has to be usable. You have to know how to use it. And so I'm a technologist. I know how to use it. I'm fortunate in that I can afford to pay for things. But like my neighbor, for example, he pays for a T1 line and that's 1.544 megabits per second. It's slower than the first generation of Ethernet from 1975. Hey, I was really jealous of neighbors with a T1 line back in 95. Back in 95. Exactly. Well, he's got it for his weather station. He's paying$600 or$700 a month for 1.544 megabits. I happen to be the very last phone line from Half Moon Bay.

41:16It's 30 kilometers away. I can't do DSL. I can't do anything. So I pay for a satellite connection. And as long as it's not foggy, and as long as a lot of people aren't using it, it works great. As long as there are no tall trees. No tall trees. I fought for two years to get AT &T to put fiber to my house because they buried the node two houses away. Yeah. But I think actually, you know, one of the things we're doing with AI is we're working with a ton of the 5G companies. So I think 5G can start to address some of that broadband connectivity in rural areas, also in urban areas. It turns out that just the placement, because the cells are so much smaller now, and there's all kinds of reflections in, you know, they call it sort of an urban jungle, where instead of trees, it's giant skyscrapers in Manhattan or something.

42:07We're actually modeling with AI all of the reflections off of buildings and figuring out where the optimal placement to get the most reach and the best performance. Well, I want to toss this one to Sean because I hear that a lot. 5G is going to change things. It's going to improve that connectivity. But 5G is still run by the big networks and they have demands like you can't download too many things at a time, that sort of thing. Sean, do you think 5G is going to? So many unlimited plans that are not unlimited. So many promises about being able to download your entire TV series before you get on the airplane.

42:47And then the airport has barely any 5G connectivity and it's technically LTE rebranded as 5G. It's difficult right now because we're in this intermediate period, but it does feel like every time they do have a leap that the cellular does get faster and more desirable than it was the last time, and that you do get to a place where at some point you don't necessarily need the Ethernet cable or the fiber cable, you know, the coaxial cable, the coaxial or the fiber cable running to your home. Do I, a technologist and Verge editor, want to have 5G instead of a physical line come in my house? Absolutely not.

43:26But I can see people who are growing up with their phones as their only computers. I can see them not only liking that, but preferring that to all the complications that come with a wired house in the future. Do you think people are going to be OK with the tradeoffs there? Because the big telecom companies, they have a much stronger control of their networks in a way that the traditional ISPs don't. This is what I'm worried about. And I know the analogy of, you know, the idea that a frog jumping into a pot of boiling water. Or, you know, you got the pot of water and you slowly bring it up to a boil.

44:02This isn't actually true that a frog doesn't feel pain as they're being boiled. They do. I'm very sorry, froggies. But there's something to that analogy. It keeps coming up. And I think that's I worry that that's what's going to happen with some of this is that we're not going to realize all of the things that we are giving up until it's a little bit too late because the carriers do have so much control. And because like with MP3 audio, they say that younger people prefer the tinniness of the compression in their MP3 music than the nice rich tones you used to get from vinyl and proper analog speakers.

44:38And certainly analog has come back in a nice way for enthusiasts. But there's this sense that we're going to lose something along the way and not realize that we've necessarily lost it. We can always go to lossless flack. I do like my flack. Flack is extremely, extremely good. Back to you, Kevin. You talked briefly about 5G and how 5G AI is really working with 5G. Does AI help in other networking opportunities or is it just 5G? No. So, I mean, we're really analyzing all sorts of optical networks. We're using the AI to design chips. So this is a strange thing for me. I've been in chips my whole career.

45:19And I always thought it was weird that we were designing chips back then so that we could stay on Moore's Law and just keep doubling the number of transistors. Today, it's amazing what we're doing. We're using light that was 190 nanometers to print features that are way smaller than that. And to do that, we have to calculate the reverse interference of the light. Today, we're printing things with 13 nanometer light that is going down to 3 nanometers. The amount of optical proximity correction, because photons are bouncing off of everything, we're doing all kinds of simulations in the real world of AI.

45:54These are reverse problems. It's actually easy to do the forward calculation. We need to do the reverse calculation. So we're doing all sorts of things. On 5G, I think it's really important. We've made great strides in the U.S. Things are getting better in rural areas. They just, I saw, passed another$60 billion as part of the infrastructure that's going to go into that. So that's great. But ultimately, there's places in the world that are way behind. Some places like Europe ahead. But ultimately, we see all kinds of innovation of AI that need network connectivity. They need 5G. They also need super fast wired connections.

46:33These two things are going to live together. If you look at that example of medicine, You know, there's lots of places in the world where now everything has been digitalized. You're not taking a CT scan, an X-ray scan anymore with computational tomography and printing that on a piece of, you know, silver nitride. Yeah. It's digitalized. And then you need to send it to somebody and you need AI to look at it, to actually do the analysis and help out the doctor and say, hey, look at this one carefully. This looks super important. So I think the network, whether it's 5G, whether it's Wi-Fi and wired and optics, all of them are going to coexist at the same time.

47:13And they're all going to have their own innovation vectors. All right. I saw Sean shake your head very briefly when he was talking. And it was around that rural broadband fund. And I'm looking at your face now and I'm seeing the feelings ready to come out. Oh, yeah. So I'm working on a story right now about that federal funding. And it's very interesting. First off, originally it was going to be$100 billion that Biden wanted to have come out, and then it turned down to$65 billion. And now it looks like it's going to be about$41 billion that's actually going to go out there. But the idea is maybe we can finally connect everyone.

47:50We can close the digital divide if we roll out that$41 billion appropriately. But you know, not having any real choice of broadband, and I know not having any real choice of broadband for a long time, that it's going to be incredibly difficult to roll out that money appropriately. The allocations are based on faulty broadband maps where the Internet service providers were saying, here's where we are, believe us. And the FCC said, sounds good. We can't tell. You're right. If you have one person that has 5G connectivity, then the county has 5G connectivity. In your census block, anybody in your census block, they're finally fixing that.

48:28You could start to challenge these maps, but maybe not in time before the money comes out. 16 states in the United States have limitations on how that money can be spent in terms of you can't spend it on municipal broadband. So the public money gets used to erect toll bridges that the various carriers and providers own instead of being used to create public roads that cities own. Yeah, so we definitely need it. So some way or another, because I think one of the things we've seen, you know, the amount of interesting content from generative AI. I think, you know, somebody said, what is the future?

49:08They asked Bob Metcalf. He's like, I don't know. But I loved his line about COVID. Yeah. It was, what was it? It was COVIDio. Yeah. Collaborative video. Collaborative video. That was a great line. And we hadn't anticipated that. And yet it was there. I actually worked on video conferencing back in the 90s. And we said it was going to be, I mean, the first call for AT &T was in 1964 at the World's Fair in Chicago. And they said it was the technology of the future. When I left that startup that I was at, I was still convinced it was the technology of the future. And suddenly COVID hit. And wow, everybody is doing video calls.

49:45So it's interesting how things, when you build that infrastructure, the geniuses in the world, and they're all over the world. We tend to be a little arrogant here in Silicon Valley, but I've worked all over the world. And, you know, trust me, there's innovative, brilliant people in Europe and in Texas and on the East Coast. They will figure out different ways to use these capabilities. So I think we've just got a tremendous excitement going on. I don't know what's going to come, but I know it's going to need a lot of bandwidth and a lot of GPUs and compute capacity because that's just the way the world is going today.

50:19We have so much data and we can generate so many cool things now. Well, I hope from your lips to all the ISP's ears, they start rolling this out. I want to thank you for joining us and I want to thank you guys for joining us. And I also want to, I'm going to do a plug because we've been working with the Computer History Museum on a really, really cool documentary. It's going to be premiering next week and it's called The Final Act of the Lisa. If you know about the Lisa, there's that apocryphal story about a bunch of them being buried in a landfill. We got the true story. We found the people who saw this thing happen.

50:54It's super, super cool. The trailer dropped last week. I encourage you to go watch it. I encourage you to go watch the video next week. It's going to be super fun. And thank you so much for the Computer History Museum for working with us on this project. It's been awesome. Thank you guys so much for joining us today. Thank you. All right. We've got to take one more break. And then we're going to talk about Zelda because I need to talk about Zelda. We'll be right back.

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53:40Welcome back. If you're listening to this podcast, there is a pretty good chance that you're already deep into the new Zelda game, Tears of the Kingdom. It's a huge hit for Nintendo, selling 10 million copies on the Switch just in the first few days and presumably many more since then. It seems like half the Verge is playing it all day every day. There were even a couple of people who took the day off the day it came out just to play it all day. They're finding new ways to explore Hyrule, new uses for Ultrahand, and epic new weapons to take down all their enemies. I've been playing too, though not as much as I'd like.

54:12And I have lots of questions about why this game seems to work so well, about why there aren't more games like this, and about how in the world I'm supposed to get off this stupid island that I have been stuck on for like three hours. So I grabbed Alex and The Verge's Ash Parish to talk about all of it. Alex, hello. Hello. Oh, Ash. Hi. Welcome back. Hello. Thanks for having me. I have a million things I want to talk about, but the first thing we need to do is we just need to establish some baseline here. I was just looking and I've played like six hours and change of Tears of the Kingdom. I would like to have played more, but I have a small child who just hit the point where he understands when I'm not looking at him and grabs whatever I'm holding and tries to put it in his mouth.

54:55So it has been a challenge, but I will get my numbers up. Alex, how much have you played? And then we're going to get to Ash, who I suspect has us just decimated here. I want to caveat that I had to move and go to a wedding. So I too have had struggles, but I've gotten at least five minutes into Zelda. So you've like said the word Zelda out loud at one point in your life is basically what you're coming to this one. Look, he got a new arm. Is that a spoiler? Am I allowed to spoil that? No, I think we're good on that one. Also, one of the things we're going to talk about is that there is nothing about this game that has not been spoiled.

55:26Ash, hit us with it. How much is this game? So I want to caveat this with nothing. I cannot explain or defend my actions, but I looked today and I have over 175 hours in this game. Hell yeah. I haven't no life to game this hard since ever. As you think about it, does that feel like less than you would have thought, more than you would have thought, or like about the right amount? Oh, more than I would have thought. Like I don't do the kinds of things that I'm doing in Zelda. I don't do that for any game. I just don't do it. The only thing that even comes close is maybe like World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy 14.

56:06And those are games that are designed to have you play it as long as possible because the content doesn't end. It's ongoing, right? This game has a discrete ending that's somewhere. I just, I ignore it. I refuse to engage with it. I have spent all of my time. I have unlocked every shrine in the underworld. I am working my way back to unlock every shrine in the overworld. And along the way, I get pulled into these neat little side adventures that have just, I keep racking up the hours. I can't explain it. Okay, well, the rest of this segment is just going to be Alex and I are going to leave and you can just talk about kind of whatever you want for a while because we are not qualified to be here with you.

56:45But actually, where I want to start is I want to go back a little bit because obviously this is the sequel to Breath of the Wild, which was this like earth shatteringly great game in 2017 and like, kind of not came out of nowhere, but was like an even bigger surprise and how great it was than I think Tears of the Kingdom has been. And I'm curious, like looking back, you know, six years ago, did Breath of the Wild sort of change video games forever? There were all these hot takes back then about like, this is a new paradigm for how we're going to experience video game. And this is just a whole different universe and things will never be the same.

57:18Did that happen, Ash? What do you think? No. Okay. I think that everybody would like to think that Breath of the Wild changed the world. I think Breath of the Wild changed how we think about games. And I definitely think Breath of the Wild changed, like set a bar, like set a very new, very high bar about how video games are talked about, like, and critiqued by papers of record or whatever. Like, it's definitely set that bar high. But in terms of like changing, like the video game landscape, not really. No. I mean, Nintendo is a very unique company. The things that they do, the games that they make, people try, but they just cannot replicate them.

58:02It just stands alone as this like extremely high bar that people aim for. And sometimes they get close and we get great games out of that. And sometimes they just completely miss the mark. But at the same time, because Nintendo is so unique, other game developers are like, we can't even do that. We can't touch that. So we're not. We're going to do our own thing. And I don't really honestly think that game development or the kinds of games that we've seen since Breath of the Wild have been too terribly influenced by it. I mean, because Breath of the Wild didn't really do anything too different or crazy.

58:32It just presented all of these different elements together in this really unique package. But things that have existed before, crafting existed before, open world exploration existed before. We've seen all of these things done before. It's just Nintendo was able to do it in this extremely unique, extremely polished, extremely approachable way that has not existed anywhere else. See, I kind of disagree. Okay. So I don't play games as often as you do, obviously. I think just where I'm sitting, it feels like a lot of the games I've seen, especially the AAA games, those games that people really get hyped on, those games for people like me who don't play a lot of games and we only kind of hop into this space on periodic basis.

59:16A lot of those games feel really strongly influenced by Zelda, particularly the ability to kind of go everywhere and do kind of anything. And then like this could be because before Zelda came out, I was just playing Horizon Forbidden West forever. And that game is like just a direct line from Zelda, like just virtually identical in a lot of ways. Are you sure it's a direct line from Zelda? Because Horizon Zero Dawn was pretty much the same thing. Yeah, but you couldn't float around on a little parachute. Okay, okay, okay, you're right. That is a big... I can caveat my previous answer in that the real, the big thing that we've seen from Zelda that everybody else is doing now is paragliding.

1:00:00That is the thing. Which is the greatest game mechanic in video games. So, like, in that sense, good job to Zelda. It never stops being fun. And I found myself just, like, playing Horizon for the rest, being like, oh, it's just, I can't wait for Zelda. I love doing little floaties and stuff like that. But yeah, I think, and I feel like we saw a lot of clones or attempts to clone Zelda after the first one came out in 2017. And most of them weren't successful, obviously. But I think it has kind of opened up people's brains. And what I really hope comes from this game is this game is built on the same engine as the last one.

1:00:37And I actually really like that. And I wish more video game makers would not need to reinvent the wheel every time they do a sequel and sometimes just be like, actually, we just want to tweak a few mechanics and tell a really cool story and put you back in these spaces. And it seems like Zelda is doing that. And everybody should take note because it works. It's fun for the five minutes I've played so far. I think it would be a really worthwhile experience to talk to other game developers at these AAA studios. because one of the things that we're starting to see now are game developers getting their hands on zeldas and freaking out about how the physics engine works and remind and mind you this is still running on the switch which is extremely underpowered hardware right it doesn't hold a candle to your xboxes and your ps5s but you can take you know the the clip that's going around right now is that you have this like you know metal rope bridge that you attach to some wheels and you send it across some lava and the physics is just like completely like accurately represented in this astounding way.

1:01:38And I would love to hear game developers talk about why this works so well and how almost magic it is that Nintendo was able to get this work on such underpowered, quote-unquote, hardware. Yeah, our colleague Charles Pulleymore talked to the creative leads, and one of the things they said to him about that was they like, I think they called it fake physics, where it's this idea of even when it doesn't follow actual physics, it follows how physics sort of should be intuitively. Like if you hold a big thing and throw something, it's going to do more damage. And it's like intuitively it tracks. And there's so much of that in this game.

1:02:12Like even if the thing that you do wouldn't actually happen in the real world, it feels like it should happen. And it does. And it's it's I can't explain how that feels, but it's so cool and so unusual in a game like this. But I want to talk about the switch thing, because this is the thing that has stuck out to me the most. One of the things that has occurred to me is that there's a lot of like Roblox and Minecraft in a game like this. It's so big. It's so open. It's so about like creation and tinkering and playing. And like, at least in my experience so far, the actual sort of plot of the thing is kind of ancillary to just like figuring out what this world is and what you can do and how it can work.

1:02:49But it works offline and I can do it in a thing that I hold in my hand. Like I played it. I played three hours on an Amtrak the other day. Like I can't play any other games on Amtrak because they all have to be connected. they all require really great low latency interconnect connections but this i can like pick it up i hit a three times i hit a one more time and i'm back in zelda and there's just like something about this hardware it's less powerful the screen frankly kind of sucks i still have the original switch but there's something about it that was like more enticing than my typical process of like booting up my playstation and waiting an hour for it to load and the internet connection being screwy and it's like it just felt better to me i don't know if that's been y 'all's experience But the Switch actually feels like perfect for this game to me.

1:03:31Absolutely. I think that's another thing that speaks to Nintendo's uniqueness is that they say that they want to be not accessible in terms of like accessibility, but accessible as in wide ranging. And because, you know, people are grown and they have grown jobs and they have kids and other people are, you know, they're kids. They're like, you know, 10, 11 and 12 years old and they don't have the capability or the interest in doing like, you know, the 4K ray traced crisis, whatever. And that's what makes the Switch and, by example, this game so accessible because it is, you know, on this cheaper hardware that everybody has and everybody can play.

1:04:09And there is a very relatively low barrier of entry. Like they do that stuff intentionally because they want to appeal to as many people as possible. and it works and it works really well. They know who their audience is. They're not going after, you know, our Tom Warrens who wants everything to be ray traced or whatever. They're not going for the people who need to see like every single pore on Kratos' face. That's not, that's never been their bag. That'll never be their bag. And they know that they have the people that will spend hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hours on this game alone for the rest of the year.

1:04:44They've got their audience locked in. They're very good at that. And that's why the Switch does what it does. and this game does what it does and you don't need an internet connection to play it. First of all, shots fired at Tom Warren. Tom, come on this podcast and yell about ray tracing anytime you want. We're ready for you. But no, I think one of the funniest things to me was reading the comments on your review, Ash, and a bunch of people were like, oh, why didn't you talk about performance? It only runs at 30 frames per second. And in almost every single case, there was a reply to those comments saying, yeah, it doesn't matter.

1:05:14Running Zelda at 60 frames per second is not the reason that Zelda would be great. Like, that's not how that works. Exactly. And that's another thing about, you know, this particular game and Nintendo's business ethos overall is that this game sold 10 million copies in like its first three days. Right. And it is completely offline. It is, you know, it has these terrible, you know, 720p graphics and, you know, 30 FPS and people bought it en masse because it doesn't matter. There are no multiplayer options. As far as we know right now, there is no like microtransactions, no, you know, there'll probably be a story DLC later and stuff you can buy to, you know, add to it or whatever.

1:05:54But, you know, it doesn't have a battle pass or anything like that. It's just this single player experience that demands people's attention. And that's kind of refreshing when you have games like Diablo Immortal and when you have games like Call of Duty and, you know, Overwatch, where every AAA studio seems like it has to pump out these looter shooters that keep you on a hamster wheel for as long as possible while, you know, they're taking money out of your wallet. And that's just not what this is. And people respond to that. And I hope more people see that from Breath of the Wild and now Tears of the Kingdom and want to emulate that.

1:06:30Like there was a while ago where people, the discourse was, you know, single player games are dead because, you know, the landscape is dominated by your Fortnites and your Call of Duties. And it took a game, I hope it takes a game like Zelda for people to realize, like, that's not the case anymore. One of the things you said in a couple of your stories, Ash, is that A, you've never really fallen for Zelda games before, which is also true of me, including Breath of the Wild. I played it a little. I was like, oh, this is neat. And then I never really had the sort of compunction to keep going. and then you said in another story that you were surprised at how much you liked this game because you tend to need structure and sort of rails to play on which also resonated with me as somebody who loves like the arkham knight games are some of my favorite games ever because they're just like go there do that thing go there do that thing go there do that thing run around for a minute if you want go over there do that thing congrats you win this is the opposite of that in a way that at various times has been very exciting and absolutely infuriating to me i I spent like two and a half full hours walking around on that first island that they drop you on after the training stuff, trying to figure out what the hell to do.

1:07:29And some people are like, that's fun. You get to explore. I think it just sucks. It drives me insane. But I'm curious for you what it was that tipped it kind of the other way, where like this game resonated despite being a person like me who needs a game to kind of tell you what to do all the time. You have to make your own rails and put yourself on them. And I think Tears of the Kingdom, more than Breath of the Wild, has a good way of making you make your own rails. And then while you're on the path that you've set for yourself, you can see things like on the periphery that you can go then and explore.

1:08:03So the way that I crafted my own rails is that I wanted to uncover all of the map. So when I first got off the tutorial island down to Hyrule proper, I'm like, okay, I'm going to investigate all of the Sky Tower so I can unlock all of the map. And then when you're traveling from place to place to place, you see somebody with a little quest thing up and you're like, oh, okay, this is a low lift thing that I can do while I'm on my main quest, which is not to save Zelda, but cartographer's experience. and while you're on that like that main quest you you kind of find these little side quests that you can do on the periphery that kind of like expand from there and so from after i discovered all of the towers i next wanted to do the shrines because i like those puzzles those puzzles give me good brain feeling good brain scratch so you know from from the the towers i go to the shrines and then from the shrines you know you go to the underworld which kudos to nintendo for like completely obscuring that from all of the promotional materials.

1:09:01It was a real treat to explore the depths and go down into the depths for the first time. That was great. And then from there, you know, I want to explore the depths. The depths is this dark place where you can't see like five feet in front of your face for the most part, but they have these like little light roots that will light up the area so you can see what you're doing and where you're going. So I went completely sycamore and found every light route in the depths. And then from that, you know, while I'm doing all of these different side quests on the way, I learned that there is a one for one, the light routes in the depths have a corresponding shrine on the overworld.

1:09:39So by, you know, the transitive property, if I can unlock everything on the depths, I can find their corresponding shrines in the overworld. And through that, I can unlock the shrines in Hyrule. And it's completely absorbed my life. what kind of inspired you to create those rails? Because I think a lot of games do that. Like Skyrim was one where you could create your own rails, but also the first time I played Skyrim, I was so overwhelmed by the breadth of things I could do that I turned the game off. Like it was too much. And then I had to come back and then like, okay, I'm going to get into the plot.

1:10:11I'm going to let the plot kind of like get me into the game and then I'm going to go. And in this game, that's not necessarily the case. Like you get kind of opened up pretty quickly and then you guys both sounds like are saying, okay, yeah, I'm actually okay with creating my own rails and figuring myself out in this game. What was the little twist of this game that kind of like said, okay, I know how to create my rails here in a way I don't typically? I think for me is I don't like exploring without, you know, a direction to go. And I think one thing that was really great and really well done about Tears of the Kingdom is specifically that first part where you have to unlock all the sky towers.

1:10:49and the Sky Towers, they illuminate the map, but how they do it is that they shoot Link up in the air like they're firing him out of a cannon and you have to, and you go up and then there's this like breath and pause, like you're on top of a roller coaster before he starts plummeting to the, to the ground. And the thing that, you know, makes Tears of the Kingdom such a triumph, technically speaking, is that you can see everything. And when the closer you get to the ground, you can start to see little visual points of interest. Like, oh, that looks cool. I want to go over there or, oh, I can see the shrine from up here.

1:11:19So I'm going to go over there. So that's how I was inspired to like create this own, you know, system for me to follow, because I know that when I'm doing this, I will find other things that are also interesting on the way. And I could just build my entire experience just from that, just from that, like little thrill of discovery. That is cool. What's your strategy as a explorer like that? Are you like a read a thousand guides on the internet and go for it? Are you like a die a million times, see what happens? Like, what's your, you like land on Hyrule. Where do you go? What's your plan? It's like a bit of a happy medium between the two.

1:11:53So I got on to the ground and I'm like, oh crap, what next? I don't know what to do. This is too big. I don't want to do this. I guess I'm just going to mainline this main story quest and see what happens. You just described the part of the game I am at precisely right now. That feeling is exactly where I'm living right now and I need to get out of it. Exactly. And then I'm like, okay, well, Pura told me that if I unlock this sky tower, I can see more of the area and it'll help them with their thing. And then I got up and then I looked down and I'm like, okay, I can do this. That looks interesting.

1:12:24That's a shrine. What's that over there? What are these cool little, I don't know, drawings on the earth? What is that? I want to see what that is. And through that like initial experience, I was able to create this like branching web that set me on this path to have like 175 hours in this game. It was completely not by design at all, all like totally emergent gameplay. And I think now that the game is out, like, you know, before game is out, like you're kind of on your own, you have to figure it out because you have no help. But now that the game is out and the guides writers are doing the Lord's work by putting up all these like, you know, guides and walkthroughs and whatever, whenever there's a time when I get stuck or my patience where is a little thin, I can now like look up something and it can help me.

1:13:10Like I don't need a step-by-step now because I've had so much time in the game. I don't need a step-by-step like walkthrough of what to do. I just need a hint for where to go and I can figure it out myself. And I like doing that. Like I tend to, I get that little, that feeling of I didn't need any help. And I did this all by myself because I'm a big girl. So I have, I get too much of a good feeling out of that to want to look up guides too much. But there are some parts where I get like, okay, this is too much. I need a little help. Tell me where to go. So it's a little bit of A and B. Yeah. Quick plug, both for the stuff that you and Charles and Andrew have done on our site, and also our friends at Polygon who put together like the most detailed guide I've ever seen.

1:13:48That interactive map is ridiculous. It's incredible. If you need to know anything about Tears of the Kingdom, it's in Polygon's guide somewhere. It's very good. We'll put it in the show notes. The thing about all of this though, is I think there's like something amazing that this game has done with kind of the way it thinks about puzzles, right? And you can put things together and you can use Ultra Hand to move things around and fuse things. And I sensed in your review, Ash, that you're struggling with the tension between like, okay, this dynamic is very cool. I can do so much stuff. This world is big and cool and exciting and open.

1:14:19And is that all coming at the expense of like making me care about the characters and story and sort of world that I'm in. Do you still feel that having, you know, 178 hours in, do you, do you find yourself sort of more attached to the people, places and stories than you did? Or do you still kind of feel that tension? I wish I could care more about these people and I don't, and they try to make you care and it just doesn't work. It's just, you bounce right off of them. I think more so than what I did in Breath of the Wild. So it's, it's much different in Breath of the Wild, the way the story is told because it made you care about the characters that you were the champions right and they and they were already dead so you go through the game and link doesn't have his memories and you go find the memories and you relive these memories of these people and like oh foot i have a soft spot for you like because you know you we were friends i don't remember you anymore and i you know and but i can't have that friendship now because you're gone and i think that created a sweeter, better narrative moment than anything Tears of the Kingdom has done.

1:15:25Because Tears of the Kingdom story might as well not even be mentioned. You have to save Zelda. And there's a really hot goat dude. And there's a really hot archaeologist dude. And there's, you know, a really hot city full of women. And there's a really hot fish guy. And that's it. It is like an unusually sexy Nintendo video game, I will say. Nintendo is funny because they totally realized that everybody was like super horny for the fish prince. And they were like, okay, calm down. We're going to marry this guy off in hopes that you guys will like chill out. And you know, it's not going to work, but I could totally clock that they did.

1:16:02They're like, you know what? Y 'all are too much. Let's get our boy married up and away from you sickos. So. I mean, there's nothing better than a sexy bad guy. That's just true. I mean, so one of the things I think is so interesting about Breath of the Wild and seems to have really influenced Tears of the Kingdom. And Ash, this is a question for you. And I'm curious if you're going to get to like from 178 to like 500 hours, because the magic of Breath of the Wild was that like still now people are playing it and discovering new things they can do and new ways to beat the game. And it's an increasingly weird vibe over in Breath of the Wild.

1:16:31I think people are just like getting real weird with it, how to do everything. Is Tears of the Kingdom going to have that same thing where like you're going to be able to sort of play the game a hundred different ways, a hundred times, and six years from now, you're still going to be finding new things about it oh absolutely what i'm starting to see are people like recreating the tricks and the trick shots from breath of the wild into tears of the kingdom but like the thing that has like dominated the discourse for the weird things that you can do is korok torturing which makes me very sad because they're just baby it's it's so weird i don't i don't understand like you people need therapy those are the little guys with the leaf faces right yes and then in breath of the wild like you found them in these like weird places and they gave you a little seed and then you collected all like 900 yeah like yeah you found me and then you get like 900 of them and then the payoff for doing that is like really lackluster so i guess people are taking their frustrations out on them in this new game i definitely was gonna do it and i didn't on the first one no i can't bring myself to do it but there are so many different varying ways that you can violate geneva conventions in this game that is gonna give this game just as long a tail as Breath of the Wild had because your creativity is limitless.

1:17:45With the number of different devices that you have and the ways that you can deploy them, we're going to be seeing crazy stuff in perpetuity. And that's the most exciting thing about Tears of the Kingdom for me is because I'm not that creative. I'm not really a good builder. I don't get joy from that at all. I just want to make the thing that is the most functional that will do its purpose. I don't need any kind of flash or panache or anything like that. I don't have the patience for it. But watching other people do that stuff is like, I have a good time. I could watch hours of it. And just the fails too, in addition to like all of the successes, like, you know, you jump up and then, you know, Link accidentally gets hit in the head with his own creation because it fell out of the sky or something like that.

1:18:25I love that stuff. And I can't wait to see that stuff. I can't wait to see speed runners break this game. They have already. They're going to break it more. And I can't wait to see that and just see all like, oh, that's brilliant. it. Like just today, like the things that I'm learning from people is just so fulfilling to me. Like there's in the depths, you know, it's dark and they have like a little Zonai device that is like a flashlight, right? That you can use. It consumes energy, but you can use it to light it up. But I saw someone today, like they made like a little cart to drive around in the depths.

1:18:54And instead of sticking a light, a lamp on it that consumes energy, they stuck one of those little bright bloom seeds that you have that, you know, that you can throw that will light up an area, like a static flashlight. And I'm like, I never thought of that. It's so brilliant. It doesn't consume any energy. That's cool. Yeah. Just the things that I'm learning from people, like that is far more exciting to me and pays off so much more to me than just like my own experience that even in itself has been extremely rewarding. And Nintendo always says that they don't intend for people to do the weird stuff, but it's like Nintendo, come on, like we know.

1:19:27Come on. You want people to do the weird stuff. Yeah. If you're going to give people, what's the line in Mythic Quest, the like time to penis and it's like Nintendo knows right like this is a thing it's gonna happen it's great content everybody wins I mean if they didn't want us to do it like they would not have given us all of the different weird things that they gave us like there's one Zonai device that's called a stabilizer and I've only used it like maybe twice it's a thing that where you hit it it will orient everything attached to it like straight up at like a 90 degree angle, right? It seems like the most useless thing, like throughout the course of the game that I've played, because like I said, I've only used it like once and that's because they give it to you in a shrine.

1:20:10But seeing people like out in the wild, like make use of it, I'm like, oh, okay. Yeah. That wasn't for any kind of thing that they thought, oh, this is cool. This is specifically a sicko enabling device. This is for people because they want people to do crazy stuff and they know it would make it easier if they had something that will make sure that Whatever you make will stand the way that you want it to make. And that's why that was made. You can see it. Ash, your job is to turn sicko enabling device into an official video game term. We're going to make this happen. This is it. That is the official term.

1:20:41SEDs. This is everything. All right. We all have more hours to play. Alex, we're going to check in on Friday and every Friday from now on to see which of us has played more. It's going to be great. Ash, Alex, thank you both. Thank you. Thank you. All right. That's it for the Vergecast today. Thanks to everyone who came on the show and thank you so much for listening. I have a lot of Tears of the Kingdom to play and I appreciate you listening to this podcast instead of playing Tears of the Kingdom. That is a great honor. There's a whole lot more from this conversation at TheVerge.com. As always, we'll put some links in the show notes, but read the website.

1:21:14It's a good website. If you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or ultrahand tips you want to tell me about, you can always email us at vergecastattheverge.com or call the hotline 866-VERGE-11. We love hearing from you. send all your thoughts and questions. And starting next week, we're going to do a hotline question every single episode. So keep them coming and we're going to get through as many as we can. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. Brooke Minters is our editorial director of audio. The Verge Cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neel, I, Alex, and I will be back on Friday to talk about Microsoft Build, Instagram's new text-based social network, and all the other news of the week.

1:21:52See you then. Rock and roll.

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