Through the Breath of the Wild BetterVR mod, one of Nintendo’s biggest hits can now be played in full virtual reality, featuring full motion controls, 6DOF head tracking, and all you would expect from an immersive VR game. Melee combat, paragliding, shield-surfing, and all the unique moves available to Breath of the Wild players can now be experienced in VR. The BetterVR mod isn’t just limited to a first-person VR conversion, either—it also allows for third-person gameplay, should you want to keep things more traditional while still immersing yourself fully in Hyrule. And yes—you can still pet the dogs.

While the mod is open source and will of course be made freely-available in less than 48 hours (so on December 30), there are some caveats. Like with all emulation projects, the onus is on you to acquire and rip your own legal copy of the game to play it within the Cemu Wii U emulator. You’ll need a reasonably-beefy CPU to run the game well after that, and need to install additional mods in order to make it playable at 60+ FPS, which is integral for a good experience in VR, where low framerate can be nausea-inducing.

But for players who can rise up to meet that technical challenge and who have all the requisite hardware, the launch of Breath of the Wild BetterVR will truly be a holiday gift like no other. The mod developer also notes that AMD GPUs may not be supported at launch, and driver bugs prevented the mod from working at all on their AMD test system. AMD CPUs will work fine, though, with good results reported on both an Intel Core i9-13900K paired with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 and an AMD Ryzen 5 7600X with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060.

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Christopher Harper – Tech Writer – 12 articles published on Notebookcheck since 2025

Christopher Harper is a southeastern US-based tech writer with over a decade of experience covering PC, gaming, and technology how-tos and news. Off work, he focuses on challenging action games and gym time.