The emulated version of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017) is getting an unofficial mod this week that will bring full 6DOF PC VR support to the game.
The News
Created by ‘Crementif’, the BetterVR mod for BotW promises to bring fully stereo-rendered, 6DOF VR support to the Cemu emulated version of the game, including full hand and arm support for things like wielding weapons, torches and Bokoblin arms.
Notably, the mod is designed for the Wii U version of BotW, which comes with the usual provisos of requiring a legal copy of the game—no game files are supplied in the mod. Additionally, because it’s using Cemu, the popular Wii U emulator for PC, the VR mod also boasts a large list of mod compatibility.
“While I put a lot of effort into this mod, not everything works. Expect some jank that’ll be resolved over time,” Crementif says. “AMD graphic cards might not be supported (at launch at least). During testing we could not get it to work on an AMD system due to a driver bug.”
Crementif notes that performance will “not be as good as a native VR title due to CPU-heavy emulation,” additionally saying that frame interpolation made it “very playable” on a few test systems quoted below:
- i9-13900K, RTX 4090, 32 GB RAM, Pimax Crystal Super
- Ryzen 7600x, RTX 3060 12GB, 32GB RAM, Meta Quest 3
BetterVR is releasing as an open source project on December 30th, and will be freely downloadable from Crementif’s GitHub.
My Take
At least from test footage, the VR mod for BotW predictably appears to suffer from a few of the same issues seen in emulations of the game on flatscreen, notably jumpy frame rates and inconsistent texture loading. I’m excited, but definitely keeping my expectations in line with whatever weirdness pops up inherent in the emulation process.
Still, by the looks of it, VR interactions in BotW look pretty magical: things like cutting down trees, slicing Bokoblins, and shielding yourself from incoming strikes all seem to be great fits for immersive interactions.