Terms like “ray tracing” are all the rage these days among video game tech enthusiasts, and not for no reason. Remakes of older titles, like Bluepoint’s excellent Demon’s Souls, tap into every fiber of modern technological improvements to provide players with jaw-dropping visuals in every nook and cranny. With Breath of the Wild now over four years old, it’s no big surprise that some folks are working hard to improve the game’s graphics with stuff like ray tracing, 8K definition, and probably some black magic or something. I’ll bet she helped.
A recent example of this can be found courtesy of Digital Dreams, a German modder whose high-tech rendition of Breath of the Wild is well worth more than a passing mention here at Zelda Universe. Whether or not the stylistic nature of his mod is to your taste, it’s difficult to deny that plenty of work has been put into making a more realistic post-apocalyptic Hyrule shine in its own respect.
Of course, with great power comes great — well, probably debt, if I were to go out and purchase a computer capable of sampling this mod on my own right now. An Asus TUF RTX 3090 graphics card? Nope, I don’t have that. 32GB of RAM? I certainly do not have that. A 2TB-sized SSD? Honestly, I’m fortunate that this old laptop still turns on every morning.
But maybe your PC’s got the chops for Digital Dreams’ razor-sharp blades of grass and totally retextured towns. And, if so, maybe you’ll race to reimagine the best-slept Link’s epic open-world journey. Personally, I think I’m still more attracted to the Studio Ghibli aesthetic that the “ordinary” version’s got going on. This is a bit, well, Dreamworks for my taste? But if the dream works for you, by all means, dream on.
