Just days after release, 'Breath of the Wild' is running on a Wii U emulator

By Jayce Wagner March 7, 2017

Cemu 1.7.3 - BotW

Praised for its innovative game design and killer visuals, Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild went from one of the most eagerly anticipated games of 2017 to one of the best reviewed games in recent memory. To celebrate the release of Breath of the Wild, the team behind the CemU Wii U emulator figured out how to get the game to run on a PC.

Partially, anyway.

Just two days after Breath of the Wild hit store shelves, the CemU team had managed to get it working on their Wii U emulation platform. Don’t get too excited — it’s still in very early stages, and most of the game is unplayable due to game-breaking physics bugs and other major issues.

According to Kotaku Australia, you can’t get very far in the game, and performance is still a little rough. Running on an Intel Core i7-4790K, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 780, and 8GB of system memory, the emulation delivers predictably choppy performance. The real achievement here is that it’s running at all, the CemU team went from barely being able to access the menus in Breath of the Wild to having access to the full game in just two days.

Motherboard spoke to “Exzap,” one of the CemU team’s developers, and shed some light on the magnitude of their achievement, as well as their plans for the future.

“The goal is to get every game running 100 percent eventually. How we get there and how long it will take is difficult to answer. But in regards to [Breath of the Wild] I think we will see small incremental improvements in almost every future CemU release. It’s been this way for most other games so far,” Exzap said, speaking with Motherboard’s Jordan Pearson.

Eventually, the goal is to have a fully functional version of Breath of the Wild capable of running in CemU, which could mean you’d be able to play the game at resolutions beyond its native 720p or 900p. That is, unless Nintendo’s legal team manages to squash the project first, an eventuality which Exzap says he’s already preparing for.

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A staff writer for the Computing section, Jayce covers a little bit of everything -- hardware, gaming, and occasionally VR.

Gaming

Don’t expect Zelda’s $70 price to become the new Switch standard, says Nintendo

Link looks at his hand in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom will be Nintendo's first Switch game to be priced at $70. News that Tears of the Kingdom, a sequel to one of the bestselling and most critically acclaimed titles on the system, will have an increased price compared to its predecessor came as a surprise over three-and-a-half years after its announcement. It also raised questions about what the future of pricing for Nintendo games will be, especially as Sony, Microsoft, and third-party publishers all upped the cost of their new games in recent years.
While Nintendo will release Tears of Kingdom at $70, a spokesperson for the company tells Digital Trends that this will not always be the case for its first-party games going forward.
"No," the spokesperson said when Digital Trends asked if this is a new standard. "We determine the suggested retail price for any Nintendo product on a case-by-case basis."
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom – Official Trailer #2
To get more insight into the price shift, I spoke to Omdia Principal Analyst George Jijiashvili, who explains what has caused the price of games to go up in recent years and how Tears of the Kingdom demonstrates that Nintendo will "remain flexible about first-party title pricing." Ultimately, Nintendo fans are finally starting to feel the impact of inflation that's been sweeping across the game industry, even if it's only "on a case-by-case basis" for now.
The price is right
Nintendo claims that not every one of its significant first-party game will be $70, and we can actually already see that in action. Preorders just went live for Pikmin 4, which launches on July 21, after Tears of the Kingdom, and it only costs $60. Still, Zelda's price tag indicates that going forward, Nintendo will at least consider raising the price of its most anticipated games to $70. But why start with Tears of the Kingdom?
When asked why it chose Tears of the Kingdom as its first $70 Nintendo Switch game, a Nintendo spokesperson simply reiterated that the company will "determine the suggested retail price for any Nintendo product on a case-by-case basis." Still, it's a surprising choice for Nintendo to make that pricing change to just one exclusive game almost six years into the Switch's life span. Jijiashvili thinks the choice to do this with Tears of the Kingdom was a pretty apparent one for Nintendo, although it won't apply to everything going forward.
"If you are going to make a game $70, it's going to be the follow-up to one of your most critically acclaimed and bestselling games ever," Jijiashvili tells Digital Trends. "I don’t think that this means that $70 will become the standard price for all major Nintendo releases. It's worth noting that Metroid Prime Remastered is priced at $40. It's clear that Nintendo will remain flexible about first-party title pricing."

It makes basic financial sense for Nintendo to ask for a little bit more for a game it knows will be one of the biggest releases of 2023. But what factors in the game industry and world's economy at large caused Nintendo to make this decision?
Priced Out
For more than a decade, people got comfortable with AAA video games being priced at $60. Of course, there were occasional exceptions to this rule, but it was seen as an industry standard until the dawn of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. Publisher 2K was one of the first to announce a price increase, and companies like EA, Sony, and Microsoft have all followed suit. Jijiashvili chalks this up to inflation-related pressure on game publishers.
"The games industry has already been experiencing a lot of inflationary pressure," he explains. "AAA games are much more expensive to make now than they used to be, but prices have actually been declining in inflation-adjusted terms -- if prices had risen with inflation since 1990, they would now be over $90. On top of that, we’ve had a big burst of general inflation, meaning that publishers are looking at big increases in everything from salaries to tools. It’s going to be really hard for most publishers to avoid passing on all those extra costs at some point."
Jijiashvili provided us with a graphic created by Omdia that "shows what the typical price points for each generation would look like if you adjusted for inflation." As you can see, the inflation-adjusted prices are only exponentially growing, and the big game pricing shifts the graph highlights were all technically not even enough to keep up with inflation when they happened.

Gaming

Want to predict the next big Nintendo Switch game? Just rewind 5 years

nintendo switch five year cycle fire emblem engage characters

When it comes to the video game industry, we're currently living in an age of speculation. Players are no longer satisfied just getting news on upcoming games by patiently waiting for announcements. Insiders and leakers have become a fundamental part of the game hype cycle in the social media age, fueling a need for unofficial scoops. When a gaming livestream gets announced, it's usually surrounded by tons of rumors, leaks, and predictions that set some high expectations. It's easy to get disappointed by something like Nintendo's September Direct when leaks from high-profile insiders wind up being a bust.

But what if I told you that you can become your own insider, especially when it comes to Nintendo Switch? Yes, you can create your own realistic predictions with ease rather than getting let down by enticing Reddit threads. All you have to do is follow Nintendo's development cycle patterns, which have become crystal clear following today's Direct showcase.
Five-year plan
The deeper we get into the Nintendo Switch's life cycle, the more clear patterns in Nintendo's release cadence are starting to show. If you look at the company's first-party 2022 release calendar, you might notice that it looks a little familiar. That's because a good half of it has been comprised of sequels to games that hit the console in 2017.

Gaming

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (AKA Breath of the Wild 2) has a release date

Link on island in the sky in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

During the September 2022 Direct, Nintendo announced the title and release date for the sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Titled The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, this game will launch for Nintendo Switch on May 12, 2023.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom – Coming May 12th, 2023 – Nintendo Switch