Hyrule Awaits in Virtual Reality with Crementif’s BetterVR Breath of the Wild Mod

Crementif spent five years turning The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild into a completely immersive VR experience. His project, BetterVR, is now available for free download on GitHub, and you can get it right now if you have a legal Wii U copy of the game. All you need to run it is a computer and the Cemu emulator. According to early testers, the experience is silky smooth on high-end setups, as if you’re playing the game for the first time.

Version 0.9 was published a few hours ago, and you can now see Link’s hands and arms in their entirety, allowing you to dress up in game outfits and get a good hold on your weapon while managing your moves with realistic motion. As you’d imagine, gestures play an important role in the experience, and ordinary tasks like lighting fires or solving puzzles make use of all the standard VR techniques, such as tilting the controller to handle items. Stereo rendering makes 6DOF head tracking feel exactly perfect; there’s no jerky movement, so you get a smooth, natural vision as you crouch under branches or gaze over cliffs. Bow aiming is now limited to a crosshair on your headset, but developers promise that real direct support will be added soon.

An alternate third-person mode allows you to hover close and observe Link’s actions from a safe distance, which is very cool. Setting up BetterVR is also simple; simply download the latest zip from the GitHub releases page, place it next to Cemu.exe, and run the start batch file; it will generate a graphic pack for you. Once within Cemu, simply enable BetterVR and FPS++ in the graphic packs tab; otherwise, the game will crash. A few tweaks to the resolution (1440p or higher) and capping the FPS at 120 or 144 via FPS++ should get you up and running.

The good news is that your VR headset should work fine, if it’s OpenXR compatible. OpenXR supports a wide range VR headsets, from the Valve Index and HTC Vive to the Meta Quest and Pimax Crystal. In terms of controls, the Oculus Touch is the default, while other headsets will require some configuration with SteamVR mappings. One thing to keep an eye out for is AMD GPUs; there have been some launch troubles with these owing to faulty drivers, but NVIDIA setups with a good CPU (such as an Intel i9-13900K or Ryzen 7600X) should be fine. You should be able to achieve good framerates even on lower-end Nvidia systems (RTX 3060, for example), if you enable frame interpolation.

Most existing mods will continue to work, as BetterVR just updates the code while leaving the game files untouched. Physics are more realistic in VR, which offers up a slew of new possibilities, such as climbing, surfing shields down hillsides, and chipping away at adversaries in a more rewarding manner. Cutscenes are a little slow, and there are a few small audio incompatibilities, but generally, it’s a really enjoyable experience.