Fan Project to get Breath of the Wild Running on PC Makes Major Progress

[Addendum_Forthcoming]

Man, lotta people leaping on the WiiU age but not many commenting on the game being three weeks old. That's intriguing.

Or, you know ... where both consoles can still be bought. But hey; 'no bad tactics' ...

The funny thing is that by using their own rhetoric, it would have been morally sounder if Nintendo did what most exclusive games do and merely brought it to a single device. Instead Nintendo ported it to two consoles, to increase accessibility of their products without feeling as if to pretend it isn't allowed to have exclusives.

I mean, it's either an indictment on gamer entitlement, or it's a thumbs up to Nintendo for making quality products people want to steal and pretend like they're morally justified to do so. Seriously, people are literally arguing that people can pirate stuff 'cos Nintendo.

Rationalize it as much as you want... if you can't condone it for far more exclusive games relegated to a single console, you can't condone it for Nintendo choosing to have it on two consoles that you can purchase for yourself.

 

[TrulyBritish]

"No bad tactics, only bad targets..."?

You know, as much as this could further piracy I really don't have any sympathy for Nintendo.
I'd love to give the Zelda games a try but I'm simply not going to buy a whole separate console to do so.
At some point a company has to stop being surprised at Piracy when they make it less convenient for consumers to buy that product.

Note Escapist: I am not in anyway condoning Piracy or suggesting I am going to do so. I just think companies lose the right to complain when they add more hurdles to the "want-thing-buy-thing" method.

Such as? They've released it on two home consoles. I mean a private enterprise has a right to make their products more competitive and desireable. It strikes me as the same entitled behaviour as when Bayonetta 2 was released as a Nintendo exclusive because Nintendo was the only company to put their hand in their pockets to help make it a reality.

Is Nintendo suddenly beholden to surrendering their right to act in their own corporate good?

By your logic alone, most other exclusives are worst offenders because all other competitor consoles are even more lousy with backwards compatibility of old games.

They absolutely have that right, nor did I say I was going to pirate it (because I'm not, I'm just not going to play their games) or say it was morally ok you to pirate, just that I don't think companies should be surprised when people do their games.
It's interesting you bring up Bayonette when that is a case where exclusivity was justified. Platinum couldn't afford to make it without help and they had to make a deal, so I don't blame Platinum.
Nintendo does not have that excuse though, nor did I say this is a Nintendo only thing as I dislike the idea of exclusives generally. Guess what, won't be playing Uncharted 4 for a good while either.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

uh what, you want to put words in my mouth? In multiple posts already I've said I haven't pirated in over 15 years and I don't plan to ever again, but that doesn't magically make it so I can't say this emulated version will be the superior version *very* soon judging by their rate.

pick and choose when it's okay? I just said across the board I had the same opinion regardless of who or what it is....?

Condoning the act =/= committing the act.

Your first comment is in full support of ripping the data of BotW so people don't need to buy a switch.

Exclusivity is literally the reasoning as to why you said you support this. But that issue isn't solved without distribution of the ripped product, which is piracy. The people making the ROM still need to buy everything in order to rip it.

I said it was stupid for (nintendo in this case) someone to buy a console for this one game (I have multiple friends who have done this already for BotW), I didn't condone someone pirating it, I applauded the superior version showing nintendo up on their shitty hardware. (this could be microsoft/sony and halo/uncharted for all I care)

yes, to which did I say anything about pirating it/playing it in spite of nintendo? no? Okay then. Please continue feeding words into my mouth, I'm not full yet.

 

[immortalfrieza]

The insane thing with this is whether there's a single person on the planet who uses this emulator to pirate Breath of the Wild or any other game or not that emulating the game is even needed in the first place. Breath of the Wild and every other exclusive game should just be available on PC and multiple platforms aside from Nintendo ones to purchase and run legally as a matter of course to begin with. Monopolies are supposed to be illegal in the US and plenty of other countries yet blatant examples are everywhere, not just with exclusive video games.

 

[infohippie]

I hear ya. It sucks that the end user has to suffer through DRM while pirates have all the fun. But piracy is also a contributing factor. If a company sees that their sales numbers are low, but piracy is high, they will likely beef up DRM.

And what about the far more common case of sales being low and piracy numbers being completely made up because a company won't admit their game/movie/business model is utterly terrible? That's what gave us DRM, far more than actual piracy.

As a PC gamer, I'm pretty interested in this project. I'd love to try the Zelda series but there's no chance I'm going to buy an entire system I don't even want just so I can play one game. If these guys turn out successful I'll use their emulator and buy (note, buy, not pirate) a copy of BotW to run on it. That's a sale Nintendo will get that they otherwise never would.

The only time platform exclusives should be remotely acceptable are when they simply can't run on a system due to lack of power. Trying to leverage a hardware purchase through locking software is a shitty trick and doesn't belong in this decade.

 

[immortalfrieza]

I hear ya. It sucks that the end user has to suffer through DRM while pirates have all the fun. But piracy is also a contributing factor. If a company sees that their sales numbers are low, but piracy is high, they will likely beef up DRM.

And what about the far more common case of sales being low and piracy numbers being completely made up because a company won't admit their game/movie/business model is utterly terrible? That's what gave us DRM, far more than actual piracy.

Of course it's far more common a case that sales are low because the company and/or product is terrible since it's the sole reason. Piracy has always been nothing more than a scapegoat for media companies to blame when something doesn't sell as much as they wanted it to, it's never been responsible for the failure of any digitally downloadable media and they know that. DRM has always been about these media companies making themselves look like they are doing something. In both cases it's about IMAGE, not that they actually think it's effective or care that it's effective. In the end, it's all about appeasing the shareholders by blaming anything and everything else but the actual cause, themselves, for their failures and jiggling some meaningless shiny things like DRM in front of them, not about the consumer.

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

The insane thing with this is whether there's a single person on the planet who uses this emulator to pirate Breath of the Wild or any other game or not that emulating the game is even needed in the first place. Breath of the Wild and every other exclusive game should just be available on PC and multiple platforms aside from Nintendo ones to purchase and run legally as a matter of course to begin with. Monopolies are supposed to be illegal in the US and plenty of other countries yet blatant examples are everywhere, not just with exclusive video games.

That's a bit like saying Tv stations shouldn't have exclusive rights to the content they produce. Not sure how that would work out.

 

[jayzz911]

The insane thing with this is whether there's a single person on the planet who uses this emulator to pirate Breath of the Wild or any other game or not that emulating the game is even needed in the first place. Breath of the Wild and every other exclusive game should just be available on PC and multiple platforms aside from Nintendo ones to purchase and run legally as a matter of course to begin with. Monopolies are supposed to be illegal in the US and plenty of other countries yet blatant examples are everywhere, not just with exclusive video games.

You either don't understand what a monopoly is or are interested in bending that definition so incredibly far that it might as well not exist. Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft having their own marketplace is not the same as them owning the entire gaming market. What you are saying is that Walmart shouldn't be able to decide what it sells just because it owns the store and that the person selling the item shouldn't be able to decide on which retailer they want to sell to.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

The insane thing with this is whether there's a single person on the planet who uses this emulator to pirate Breath of the Wild or any other game or not that emulating the game is even needed in the first place. Breath of the Wild and every other exclusive game should just be available on PC and multiple platforms aside from Nintendo ones to purchase and run legally as a matter of course to begin with. Monopolies are supposed to be illegal in the US and plenty of other countries yet blatant examples are everywhere, not just with exclusive video games.

That's a bit like saying Tv stations shouldn't have exclusive rights to the content they produce. Not sure how that would work out.

they have rights to it, just like any publisher has rights to the game they produce, however, most st stations distribute their shows to other networks/streaming services after the initial run time. Hulu lives and thrives off of that.

 

[McElroy]

As a PC gamer, I'm pretty interested in this project. I'd love to try the Zelda series but there's no chance I'm going to buy an entire system I don't even want just so I can play one game. If these guys turn out successful I'll use their emulator and buy (note, buy, not pirate) a copy of BotW to run on it. That's a sale Nintendo will get that they otherwise never would.

You're planning to just pop the WiiU disc into your PC disk drive and expecting it to work with the emulator? Or if not that, how would it work without cracking the game? I'm genuinely curious. Like, my plan to play these games without buying them is borrowing the console from a friend and the games from the local library.

Jk, I don't have friends, but that's how I would do it (the library actually has games - even new-ish ones).

 

[immortalfrieza]

The insane thing with this is whether there's a single person on the planet who uses this emulator to pirate Breath of the Wild or any other game or not that emulating the game is even needed in the first place. Breath of the Wild and every other exclusive game should just be available on PC and multiple platforms aside from Nintendo ones to purchase and run legally as a matter of course to begin with. Monopolies are supposed to be illegal in the US and plenty of other countries yet blatant examples are everywhere, not just with exclusive video games.

You either don't understand what a monopoly is or are interested in bending that definition so incredibly far that it might as well not exist. Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft having their own marketplace is not the same as them owning the entire gaming market. What you are saying is that Walmart shouldn't be able to decide what it sells just because it owns the store and that the person selling the item shouldn't be able to decide on which retailer they want to sell to.

I know perfectly well what a monopoly is. If only one company is able to produce and sell a product, regardless of how many retail outfits they use to distribute it, it's a monopoly. "Video Games" are not the product, exclusive video games like Breath of the Wild are the product. If Nintendo is the only one allowed to produce and sell Breath of the Wild and only the consoles they sell are able to run it, they have a monopoly upon Breath of the Wild, and upon the console functionality required to run it. If Sony and Microsoft and some other PC developer were also allowed to produce and sell Breath of the Wild and their consoles could run it, even if they had to kick back most of the profits to Nintendo, the functionality is terrible, the graphics are worse or whatever, it wouldn't be a monopoly, and the same is true of every other exclusive game.

 

[shrekfan246]

As a PC gamer, I'm pretty interested in this project. I'd love to try the Zelda series but there's no chance I'm going to buy an entire system I don't even want just so I can play one game. If these guys turn out successful I'll use their emulator and buy (note, buy, not pirate) a copy of BotW to run on it. That's a sale Nintendo will get that they otherwise never would.

You're planning to just pop the WiiU disc into your PC disk drive and expecting it to work with the emulator? Or if not that, how would it work without cracking the game? I'm genuinely curious. Like, my plan to play these games without buying them is borrowing the console from a friend and the games from the local library.

Jk, I don't have friends, but that's how I would do it (the library actually has games - even new-ish ones).

In fairness, that actually is how it works for Playstation and PS2 games. Once you've ripped your BIOS from your console and set them up, you can literally put your game disc into your PC's drive and just boot it up like you would anything else. Assuming that's how it would work for the Wii U as well is a long shot, but otherwise if the emulator functions like most tend to you'd just need to rip the disc and make an ISO of it to boot up through the emulator.

EDIT: This is, of course, only technically legal if you own everything in question.

 

[McElroy]

snip

In fairness, that actually is how it works for Playstation and PS2 games. Once you've ripped your BIOS from your console and set them up, you can literally put your game disc into your PC's drive and just boot it up like you would anything else. Assuming that's how it would work for the Wii U as well is a long shot, but otherwise if the emulator functions like most tend to you'd just need to rip the disc and make an ISO of it to boot up through the emulator.

EDIT: This is, of course, only technically legal if you own everything in question.

And even if you owned it, it's illegal to do if there's copy protection on the disc. And what are WiiU discs anyway? How does one's PC disc drive understand them? It's technically a Blu-Ray disc, but how technically that is? Maybe there's a way to rip the disc through the WiiU itself... or someone has found/made one.

 

[major_chaos]

I love how emulation is "BAD AND EVUL AND PIRACY" pretty much only to a. paranoid megacorps and b. Nintendo fans outraged at the perceived slight to their god and savior.

Emulation is a good thing. Not only does it protect games from being lost to both physical and digital rot, modern emulators like Dolphin and Cemu can actually leverage the power of the PC to outright improve the game. "butbutbut piracy..." Is the same argument publishers use to strike against modding of games not explicitly designed for it and Apple uses to try and prevent anyone from touching the software on the iPhone. It's all part of the same "you don't own anything" song and dance used by the makers of everything from software to farm equipment, and to see some consumers dancing to the very tune invented to fuck them out of misguided brand loyalty is sad.

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

That's a bit like saying Tv stations shouldn't have exclusive rights to the content they produce. Not sure how that would work out.

they have rights to it, just like any publisher has rights to the game they produce, however, most st stations distribute their shows to other networks/streaming services after the initial run time. Hulu lives and thrives off of that.

Yeah, and Hulu pays for the privilege. If Sony or Microsoft payed Nintendo enough, they could have the same privileges too, but they don't.

 

[infohippie]

snip

In fairness, that actually is how it works for Playstation and PS2 games. Once you've ripped your BIOS from your console and set them up, you can literally put your game disc into your PC's drive and just boot it up like you would anything else. Assuming that's how it would work for the Wii U as well is a long shot, but otherwise if the emulator functions like most tend to you'd just need to rip the disc and make an ISO of it to boot up through the emulator.

EDIT: This is, of course, only technically legal if you own everything in question.

And even if you owned it, it's illegal to do if there's copy protection on the disc. And what are WiiU discs anyway? How does one's PC disc drive understand them? It's technically a Blu-Ray disc, but how technically that is? Maybe there's a way to rip the disc through the WiiU itself... or someone has found/made one.

It's not necessarily illegal, depending where you live. Fortunately I don't live in the Incorporated States of America where corporate lobbyists are more important than the nation's citizens. My country, at least for now, has considerably more consumer-friendly copyright laws but even if we did not I would not care in the slightest about breaking the copy protection anyway. If I've paid for the game, I will use it as I see fit. If I have difficulty doing that due to technical issues then I'm glad there's a lot of smart people on the internet and I will happily download a rip because, as I said, I've paid for the game. I could not care less how Nintendo sees it, I bought it, I will play it, and I will play it in the manner I choose.

 

[FalloutJack]

That's a bit like saying Tv stations shouldn't have exclusive rights to the content they produce. Not sure how that would work out.

they have rights to it, just like any publisher has rights to the game they produce, however, most st stations distribute their shows to other networks/streaming services after the initial run time. Hulu lives and thrives off of that.

Yeah, and Hulu pays for the privilege. If Sony or Microsoft payed Nintendo enough, they could have the same privileges too, but they don't.

Given the exclusivity, either they tried and Nintendo refused or they demanded a level of kickback that makes it pointless to do so, if this was attempted at all. The stuff that never makes it to another system will never make it to another system because Nintendo will never let it.

In short, Hulu gets a sweet deal in the annuls of friendly cooperation. I don't see that happening here.

OT: While they're at it, they should code the weapon durability to be anything but shit.

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

they have rights to it, just like any publisher has rights to the game they produce, however, most st stations distribute their shows to other networks/streaming services after the initial run time. Hulu lives and thrives off of that.

Yeah, and Hulu pays for the privilege. If Sony or Microsoft payed Nintendo enough, they could have the same privileges too, but they don't.

Given the exclusivity, either they tried and Nintendo refused or they demanded a level of kickback that makes it pointless to do so, if this was attempted at all. The stuff that never makes it to another system will never make it to another system because Nintendo will never let it.

In short, Hulu gets a sweet deal in the annuls of friendly cooperation. I don't see that happening here.

See, I know that, and you know that, and this guy thinks Nintendo having exclusives is similar to having a Monopoly. Which is only true in the most technical of senses.

Like, how would you break up that monopoly? Force Nintendo to spend resources developing for other platforms? Make Nintendo farm out their licenses?

It's like getting mad that Bayonetta 2 was a Nintendo exclusive while ignoring that without Nintendo's backing, it wouldn't exist at all.

OT: I hope Nintendo is uncharacteristically lenient with these guys, but somehow I doubt it. They're doing the Patreon thing after all.

 

[McElroy]

I hope Nintendo is uncharacteristically lenient with these guys, but somehow I doubt it. They're doing the Patreon thing after all.

But emulators aren't illegal.

Fortunately I don't live in the Incorporated States of America where corporate lobbyists are more important than the nation's citizens. My country, at least for now, has considerably more consumer-friendly copyright laws but even if we did not I would not care in the slightest about breaking the copy protection anyway.

Australia's copyright laws are very similar. You're not entitled to circumvent any copyright protection measures. If anything, Australian copyright laws regarding backups seem harsher than in some other places. The hopefully up-to-date source: [link]https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2015/07/format-shifting-in-australia-what-can-you-legally-do-with-your-content/[/link]

Like, sure, Nintendo isn't entitled to sell at least one console for each BotW, and so a buyer has the moral high ground for sure. Personally I view the difference between getting something cheaper and getting it for free (borrowing and so on) as a wad of cash I either spend or don't - while accessing the content anyway. To somebody else it might be important to actually own something.