Zelda: Breath of the Wild is already running on PC but there’s a catch

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild finally released on both the Nintendo Switch and the Wii U last Friday and since then, the game has gone on to get plenty of praise from fans and critics alike. However, it looks like the developer behind the Cemu Nintendo Wii U emulator has also been busy with the game and has already managed to get the Wii U version successfully running on PC. Unfortunately, ‘running' and being ‘playable' are two different things in this case.

With the current public version of Cemu, people can get to the main menu of Breath of the Wild. However, the developer behind the emulator is already working on a future update, which has managed to unlock the game, allowing movement around the world with basic character functions working correctly.

The game was recorded running on a system featuring an Intel Core i7-4790K and a GTX 780. As you can see, it's running at a very low frame rate right now. There are other problems present too though, sound comes through as just white noise, physics are broken and the Rune mechanic in this game can't be used at all. It is certainly a work in progress.

As the developer of Cemu points out in a Reddit discussion, the emulator here is mostly CPU-bound, so a better GPU won't brute force the game into running any better. The issues currently present will take a while to fix and while performance optimisations are possible, there is no ETA on when the game will be considered ‘playable' via emulation.

KitGuru Says: I'm actually impressed that the developer behind Cemu could even get this far so soon after the game's initial launch. However, this level of success may end up attracting Nintendo's attention, which could lead to some unfortunate legal issues

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