Dear Nintendo. Dude, DUDE! Why did I wait so long to play Breath of the Wild?
No seriously, I only just got a Switch last month,
but f*** I forgot that you also released Breath of the Wild on the Wii U, WHICH I TOTALLY OWN!
Why did I forget that there was a Wii U release?
DSPFOIJASPDFPOSDIFJSDPOIJFPSDOIFJSDPOFIJDPOJIF.
Well, I... think that's how you pronounce that...
Text-based temper tantrums don't always translate to voice very well.
Hi! It's me!
Austin!
Honestly, while it's a huge bummer that I waited almost a year to play
what is clearly the best AAA title to come out this year,
I'm also a little glad because in all that time Nintendo still hasn't joined the modern era of cloud-based
save backups so when I finally got my hands on a Switch,
I would have had to start all over from scratch, and in the short time I've had the game, I've clocked
over 100 hours already.
Because I have a serious weakness for open-world games!
Seriously! Look, look at my Steam profile! Barring Elite Dangerous which is an outlier because the stupid
launcher that I forget to close every time counts toward hours played,
almost everything on this list is a narrative open-world RPG.
Liquify it and inject it into my eyeballs Bethesda, my soul is prepared!!
Breath of the Wild is my first foray into the Zelda franchise in years. No! Decades!
Seriously, I didn't own a Nintendo 64, and for some reason even though I owned like 50 games for my SNES,
I didn't have any of the Zelda titles for it.
Somehow it was super important that I have the movie tie-in game for Judge Dredd,
but not one of the best games released for the console.
So yeah, I haven't played Zelda since like, this one.
But Breath of the Wild gave me the inspiration to go back and play some of the older titles and yeah,
that's right prepare yourself Wind Waker because I am coming for you! Not today, not tomorrow,
but soon we're gonna have a reckoning about giving a 10-year-old child a magic wand
that controls the weather. If you've played the game or even seen a few minutes of trailers, you know that there's a ton of
material in this game for SCIENCE.
Robots, lasers, sentient chameleons and iPhones with a battery life lasting over
100 years! Suck on that planned obsolescence! I can't even keep a phone lasting two years without something going belly-up.
But for those of you
who are internet savvy and look at thumbnails or video titles you know that's not what I'm talking about today. No,
Instead I'm focusing my cold hard
calculating SCIENCE vision on the main antagonist of Breath of the Wild,
the f***ing
rain.
Ganon? PFF
Whatever, no problem.
Bokoblins? Lynels, who cares? No skin off my nose. But when it starts to rain just
before you've gotten to the top of a very stiff cliff face, and I'm on my very last little wedge of stamina...
The climbing mechanic is just the most beautiful thing I've ever seen I love it so
freakin much as someone who spent most of their time jumping sideways up the mountains of
Skyrim and clamouring into obscure corners of World of Warcraft
I adore that a huge beautiful
Open world caters to my obsessive drive to explore by letting me go literally
Anywhere. Hyrule better settle in because I'm not rescuing any princesses until I find every fricking mountain and spelunked every
single cave! But then there's the rain
Which makes it impossible to climb by making surfaces slick. Why does it seem like it's always raining here!?
Just- just hey, hey! Nintendo! Just...
let me.... CLIMB. But while it may seem
excessive if you're an accomplished climber like me
I can't take it as granted that the seemingly constant, rainy weather is actually that ridiculous. I am after all a
SCIENTIST! So instead of crying like a little baby
I spent several days -over 50 hours- gathering and
extrapolating data for a video on a video game that will be only 16 minutes long. Let's do this!
Originally I didn't actually want to uncover the answers of the rain all that much because I was convinced that the absurdly
extreme climate conditions of Hyrule would have disastrous
consequences. Huge frozen
tundras right next to a desert right next to temperate marshes and grasslands right next to a freaking volcano
that's so hot that you just straight-up burst of the flames even if you're nowhere near the ground?
I was convinced that Hyrule would be a crater caused by excessively powerful volcanoes and
hurricanes made of death!
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
In order to even know what effect these vastly different climate zones have on one another we need to know how
big Hyrule even is and while that may seem like an
unanswerable question since there's approximately a billion different estimates out there ranging from the absurdly huge 360 square kilometers to a respectable
61 and while I was tempted to just use one of these numbers out of sheer laziness
I wouldn't be me if I didn't throw out the rulebook and find my own answers
Impossible you say? Ha!
Nope! In fact, I think I have the most accurate measurement of Hyrule size to date out of
anyone, but why do I even need to know that? Because land area is
incredibly important when looking at how winds, air pressure and weather fronts and rotation works.
We need to know how big Hyrule is so we can know exactly how
cataclysmic the weather should be and there is a way to figure out how large Hyrule is using my good friend
trigonometry and the best minigame in the world! The parasail game, which means I'ma be hearing a lot of this song
Like a lot. We can use this minigame to get an accurate measurement of Hyrule because the game
actually gives your distance in meters.
Using this we can measure a line on the ground, use that line as a radius to create a circle, use that circle to create
a pixel to square meter ratio, measure the pixels in a scale size map, bingo bango bongo, you just got Hyrule's size. Now the
problem is that you need a big measurement in order for this to mean anything; just flying 500-ish meters isn't gonna
cut it cause scaling up that measurement to cover a huge country the size of Hyrule means that any
errors or margins of wiggle room in your measurement are gonna
get scaled up exponentially, which is gonna lead to increased inaccuracies
So ideally we'd get measurements of over 1,000 meters
But in an ideal world we get something even more awesome like
5000 meters, but how is something like that even possible? I present to you the flying machine.
By abusing the absurdly broken physics in Breath of the Wild you can stack two metal objects on top of one another to create
a flying machine that never runs out of power.
It's not the easiest thing in the world to pull off
But after hours of perfecting the most useless skill on the planet you can fly a flying machine to Ridgeland tower,
land it, start the minigame
Reassemble it, take it as high as you possibly can, hit the invisible ceiling and then it's just smooth
Sailing assuming you were smart enough to make some statement of recovering items
I had to do this twice once to measure the height of the ceiling and another to actually do the long
Parasail I needed the height because the mini-game doesn't measure the distance over the ground you've traveled it measures a straight line in 3d
From wherever your feet officially leave the ground meaning that it's measuring from
1448 meters up in the air all the
Way down to where you land if you want an appropriately accurate ground measurement
You need to know the height you start flying at so you can make a right angle and use the good old
Pythagorean theorem to get the base of said
Triangle at five thousand one hundred and seventeen point nine meters of travel distance therefore you're looking at a ground cover of
four thousand nine
Hundred and eight point seven meters using that to get the area of a circle PI R squared over a map of Hyrule in creating
A pixel ratio and cutting out the land area you get a size of Hyrule clocking in at exactly
70 point nine seven square kilometers of travel above land or eighty
2.57 square kilometers if you count the ocean and outlying islands, that's
Actually not that far off from the 61 square kilometers from earlier
Which strangely is listed as being able to fit a hundred and forty vatican cities, which sounds impressive until you realize that the vatican is
Freaking tiny that's like saying Hyrule could fit a hundred and seventy-five used car dealerships alright
So we got that out of the way next is to measure the temperature all of it
Which I did I an 8-point temperature scale and measured huge
Swaths of Hyrule in order to build a temperature map the whole process
Was too boring and long to get into but at the end of the day
I built a fairly accurate temperature map of Hyrule using this combined with the known size of Hyrule
I can immediately rule out several things Hyrule is
Well, it's actually pretty tiny most actual kingdoms in real life covered over a thousand square kilometers of land Hyrule is more
the size of a Duchy or a County pretty small
But still we don't actually know how large the Empire of Hyrule was before Ganon turned it into
Fallout Studio Ghibli edition this means that things like tornadoes hurricanes, they're not a problem
We're gonna have to deal with even with these extreme temperature
Variations are simply isn't enough land mass to create the cells that drive these kinds of weather patterns which require
hundreds sometimes
thousands of kilometers and miles to form what this does mean however is that the weather and Hyrule is going to be chaotic and
Windy as hell and in order to understand why we're gonna have to talk about one thing air pressure
Weather happens because of wind and wind exists because our planet is heated unevenly
By the Sun this happens because of a few reasons one the earth is round and not flat
So as it rotates one side is getting baked from all the sweet
Sweet sunlight while the other half is covered in darkness now when one area heats up more than another a pressure
Disparity is created since hot air expands and rises when it expands it creates a tub
When it expands it creates a low-pressure area since you know spread out stuff is less dense than close together stuff
But most importantly air moves from areas of high pressure to areas of low pressure
Properly illustrated in Science Guy fashioned by this balloon this balloon is under high pressure. We're given an opportunity
It immediately deflates until the atmospheric pressure between the outside of the balloon and the inside of the balloon
normalizes this trading of high and low pressures over huge areas results in cyclones and anticyclones
as air pushes together and expands away since the rotation of the earth
creates rotation in moving objects called the Coriolis effect
And these are the scales where things like hurricanes and tornados are born, which means probably
Hyrule is pretty safe because Hyrule is super tiny that being said these
Principles of low high pressure exchange do exist in these small areas and they create something called
local winds and local weather or
micro climates these are weather and winds that only really happened in a local area of a few kilometers to
100 kilometers or so these tend to shift from day to night as temperatures change with winds moving up and down mountains
Depending upon where the Sun is but for the most part air does what it always does moves from cold
high-pressure areas to hot
low-pressure areas when this happens water condenses to form clouds like I
Don't know a glass full of ice dam
I am full of so many pearls of every day examples here mapping out the exchange of pressures from high to low which
Condenses to become high which moves out to low again
I found five key areas on the breadth of the wild map that if all is correct should be the regions of the highest rainfall
then like some sort of idiot I spent an in-game week in each of the five areas or
168 real-world minutes each
Which totaled over?
14 freaking hours of my life just so I could monitor the rainfall in these specific places and
Well, I discovered something
Mind-blowing the fifth area down to the southeast is a bit of an outlier as depending upon where you are it literally rains
24/7 but this makes sense since this is a rain forest in a basin with cold air falling down from these mountains
Joining with warm moist air from the oceans this area would be raining all
the freakin time
the other four areas however are a bit more modest ranging from ten point ninety nine percent to twenty six point six six percent of
total
I'm being either rain or
Thunderstorms on top of it 85 to a hundred percent of the days had
Rainfall meaning it either rained every single day or almost every single day and this
This is absolutely
Key not only is this totally believable based on the various pressure areas
And how they'd interact with one another this isn't actually a weird amount of rain in fact
you don't even have to live near an equatorial rain forest to
Experience this much rain what this means at the end of the day is that Hyrule is what's known as a temperate?
rainforest a region in a temperate zone that isn't swelteringly hot but gets an amount of rainfall expected of a lush rainforest region and
Honestly given the extreme regional temperature differences we should count ourselves lucky and all we get is
daily rains and we mostly don't get huge terrifying wind gusts of a hundred miles an hour the only thing the
only thing that makes n Gd s here is
Like why is there grass everywhere this place should be like riddled with trees with 12 hours a day of sunlight
Huge amounts of water Hyrule's huge Plains should look more like Fangorn than Prairie Home Companion. Oh wait
I can't make that reference anymore dammit, although give us the frame rate issues that I have in Corrick forest
I guess I can forgive Nintendo for this so
Cool, the seemingly constant rainfall actually makes a lot of sense when you look at Hyrule from above that's kind of Awesome
Looking at it this way makes me way less annoyed at Nintendo for irritatingly interrupting my ability to climb to the top of
whatever nonsense
I happen to see that I must climb it also makes the weather feel like an
intentional choice of there's like someone there really
Knew what they were doing when they plotted out the different regional biomes so cool. I guess we'll just
End it right there
awesome
sincerely Austin
PS
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