Breath of the Wild Multiplayer Mod Kind of Works, and Nintendo Isn’t Happy About It
A group of modders successfully created a Breath of the Wild multiplayer mod for PC, following a $10K 'bounty' put out by YouTuber PointCrow about a year and a half ago.
PC Gamer spoke with the modding team about the effort, which is even more impressive since it can be considered to be a sort of elaborate hack. Modder AlexMangue said:
We didn't really use the game code on its own a lot as Nintendo ships them without any symbols and therefore it is not really readable, so we had to do some hacky things to make it work. The main part of this is similar to how cheaters work on other games. We inject our own code into the emulator and therefore have access to the information saved on the RAM of your computer for the emulator process. With this, we look for certain information in the memory, such as the player's position, rotation, etc. This is the extraction part of it, just obtaining the data needed to send to a server we coded.
After the server obtains the data from each player, it then analyzes part of it and relays it to the other players. Here's where the hacky thing starts. We are actually using NPCs from the game and making them look like Link. After we spawn them, we just look for the same information we looked at before but for our NPCs and with this we change their position, rotation, etc.
According to AlexMangue, PointCrow didn't just provide the monetary incentive to build the Breath of the Wild multiplayer mod (the aforementioned $10K and more afterward); he also offered his own ideas on the creative design. As you'd expect, PointCrow immediately published videos of the mod on his channel, racking up millions of views. However, Nintendo quickly showed it was not too happy about it by blocking the videos'
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