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Breath of the Wild

The Legend of Zelda has captivated us for more than three decades now, and this franchise still has the capacity to surprise and please. With Breath of the Wild, the latest installment, Nintendo has fabricated a make clean break from much of the traditions and luggage that comes with the proper noun "Zelda" in favor of a Switch launch title that feels exciting and modernistic.

We saw the 3DS-exclusive A Link Betwixt Worlds hit in 2013, merely we haven't had a full-fledged console Zelda release since November of 2011 — more five years ago. The last console Zelda game was on the freaking Wii! Nintendo teased Breath of the Wild every bit early on as 2013, but game-starved Wii U owners were met with delay after delay. Thankfully, it seems to take been well worth the wait.

Now that the reviews have finally hit, nosotros're getting a clear moving-picture show of only how incredible Breath of the Wild really is. Over at our sister site IGN, reviewer Jose Otero gave the game a perfect score of 10/ten on the Switch. Similarly, it earned a perfect score on other major gaming outlets like GameSpot, Polygon, Game Informer, and USgamer. In fact, this new Zelda game has a jaw-dropping metascore of 98/100 based on the 64 reviews on Metacritic. Purely by the numbers, this is among the nearly well-reviewed games of all fourth dimension. That's a hell of a manner to launch a new console!

However, it'south important to remember that Breath of the Wild is releasing on the Wii U also. The dying platform of yore is not where Nintendo is putting its promotional weight, and so reviews for this version are deficient. We know that information technology'south limited to 720p output, but we're non entirely certain of any other limitations. There's been talk nigh performance issues, but we'll take to wait for more in-depth breakdowns to know for sure.

Over at Digital Foundry, footage from the Switch version of the game has been analyzed in both docked and portable mode. We knew going in that Breath of the Wild wouldn't be able to hit 1080p on the Switch, only information technology's worth mentioning that it renders at 900p while docked, 720p on the go.

While nosotros might expect the portable mode to cut back on the LOD distance or certain effects, information technology seems that resolution is really the only major deviation. Sure, the texture filtering is slightly amend in docked mode, but pixel count is really where Nintendo is compromising.

Okay, but what near frame rate? Well, here's where it gets interesting. In portable mode, when the Switch downclocks the GPU, the game actually runs better. Based on tests with the latest patch, the handheld version stays virtually perfectly locked at 30fps, while the docked mode suffers from drops down to 20fps.

Weirdly, the graphical complexity of the scene doesn't seem to touch frame rate. There'due south some sort of clogging causing problems here, and Digital Foundry theorizes that the retention bandwidth might be causing the event when pushing more pixels. We hope that Nintendo will be able to improve this in a futurity patch, just the handheld fashion is your best bet for now.

Now read: Nintendo Switch review roundup: A cracking portable, but questionable console