The PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One currently don't have emulators capable of actually running games, and Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 emulation is still a very much ongoing project nowhere near totally complete. Even systems like the PlayStation 3, because of their unique engineering, are incredibly hard to emulate today. Gaming consoles have become much more powerful and much more complicated in a very short timeframe. Related: Why Are Graphics Cards, PS5s, and Xboxes So Expensive?įor any console more modern than the Wii U, Xbox 360, or PlayStation 3, it's exponentially more difficult to emulate these kinds of systems than it is older consoles. Yes, Breath of the Wild 2 is releasing likely 5 years after the Switch launched, which is when Breath of the Wild launched in relation to the Wii U, but Switch emulation is a very different beast. The comparison between Breath of the Wild and Breath of the Wild 2 might seem striking at first, but there's more to it than you might think. Plus, it takes only a little more time to get up and running than downloading a game on Steam does.
This brings us to today where Breath of the Wild runs essentially perfectly with emulation on PC, bringing all the features you'd want with an actual PC port with it. Related: Sony's New PS5 Redesign Explained With Breath of the Wild's release, gamers fell in love with the game, so an incredible amount of time and energy was funneled into Cemu's development, particularly surrounding Breath of the Wild. Development of emulators like Cemu progressed rapidly, and games quickly performed better on the emulator than they did on the console. While bad news for games running on Wii U hardware, Wii U emulation benefited a lot from how old and slow the Wii U actually was.
When Breath of the Wild launched in 2017, gamers had been playing on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One for years, and PlayStation 4 Pro had already been out for months. Breath of the Wild was developed for the Wii U as the Wii U's major Zelda installment Nintendo tends to release at least one of per major console release.īreath of the Wild ran so much worse on Wii U because the Wii U came out in 2012 with the relative power and performance of an Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3. Breath of the Wild was ported to Switch, not developed for Switch. What you may not know, however, is that Breath of the Wild isn't a Nintendo Switch game. This is all thanks to emulation, but not the kind of emulation you might think: Nintendo Switch emulators, like Ryujinx or Yuzu, do exist and can play Breath of the Wild, but performance isn't great, there aren't many features, and these emulators themselves are still relatively early on in their development, so they aren't super stable, either. Plus, you won't need powerful hardware to do any of this. You can even install, with just a couple of clicks, a wide variety of mods. You can push out graphics settings far beyond the detail and draw distance of the Switch. On PC, you can play Breath of the Wild with unlimited FPS, in whatever aspect ratio, and at whatever resolution you want.