There’s a new way to experience Nintendo’s fantastic The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. A completely free virtual reality mod for the open-world RPG is out now, letting you hop into Hyrule like never before, and it looks amazing.
BetterVR is a newly released mod for the Wii U-emulated version of Breath of the Wild that lets you play through the entirety of the game through the eyes of Link himself. You’ll need a copy of Breath of the Wild on Wii U, a somewhat powerful PC, the Cemu emulator, and, of course, a virtual reality headset like the Meta Quest 3. But if you have all that, you can now virtually explore Breath of the Wild in a whole new way.
This is a fully stereo-rendered VR experience with 6DOF and no alternated eye rendering. BetterVR also supports full hand and arm tracking, letting you chop down trees and fight monsters by flailing around. (You can also use normal button commands if you prefer, of course.) It also features customized VR controls, like reaching behind your back to grab your sword, so it should play and feel like a native VR game.
I’m not surprised this VR mod is so good. The team behind it, Flat2VR, are the same folks who created the excellent Half-Life 2 VR mod that is as good as Valve’s very own Half-Life: Alyx. The team has also ported other games to VR and has even developed commercially released ports of titles, like Roboquest VR. Even with all that experience, however, making this mod wasn’t easy, as explained in a thorough writeup on the mod’s GitHub page. They had to reverse engineer a lot of how Breath of the Wild worked and then translate that into something that could be rendered and played in VR. The end result is impressive as heck, and I’m almost tempted to download this mod and set up an emulator to check it out. I wasn’t a big fan of Breath of the Wild, but maybe this would change my mind.
As for how Nintendo lawyers will react to this, who can say? The project seems confident enough that it will be fine, as the team has been posting about it publicly for days before it launched on Tuesday. Seeing as the mod itself contains zero Breath of the Wild files, I’d say BetterVR is probably safe, but you never know with Nintendo.