While this kind of emulator is definitely legal, and playing your own archival backups is generally safe, Nintendo isn't about to embrace emulation as a way to get the best Breath of the Wild experience. Back then, you could play a decent emulated game of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time just months after its release. Usable PlayStation and Nintendo 64 emulators started to hit the scene in 1999, when both systems were still popular on retail shelves, for instance. But PC-based emulation of contemporary games and consoles in this way isn't completely unheard of.

Advertisementįurther Reading How the demonization of emulation devalues gaming’s heritageThanks to the high overhead associated with emulating different hardware, most PC-based emulation focuses on game consoles that are one or two generations older than the computer they're running on. You'll also probably need to play with a few GPU and emulator settings to maximize your frame rate- this Reddit thread seems like a good starting point. To get the game looking that good, you'll need a decently beefy PC (the video was made with a reported i7 6700k 4.3ghz, GTX 1070, and 16GB of RAM) as well as some community-made graphics packs that resample the game's low-res textures to look acceptable when blown up to a higher resolution. While there are still some issues with bugs and cutscene playback, Breath of the Wild can now be completed through the emulator with most major features intact.Īs the above video shows, the emulated version lets players reset the game's internal resolution up to a full 4K 3840 x 2160 pixels at a steady 30 frames per second.

While the Wii U version of Breath of the Wild has technically been running in CEMU since shortly after its release early last month, version 1.7.4c of the emulator ( released just yesterday to Patreon backers and to the public on April 9) fixes most of the outstanding graphical and gameplay issues that prevented the game from being fully playable through emulation. Using the power of a Wii U emulator called CEMU, though, devoted coders have now got the game running at a full 4K resolution on a high-end PC.

On standard Nintendo hardware, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild runs at a bare bones HD resolution of 720p, or up to 900p when using the Nintendo Switch in docked mode. Be sure to take this video full screen and full resolution on a nice monitor to see just how good Breath of the Wild can look.

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