In 2021 a Youtuber offered $10K to whoever could make a Breath of the Wild multiplayer mod, and now you can play it
After nearly a year and a half of work, a small team of modders released a multiplayer mod for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild this week, fulfilling a $10,000 challenge set out by YouTuber PointCrow in November 2021. The mod, which is now available via Discord, makes it possible for up to 32 players to galavant around Hyrule together, sharing progress and competing in some custom game modes added with the mod. Lead modder AlexMangue tells me PointCrow(opens in new tab), who regularly speedruns and makes videos about Breath of the Wild, has been a big part of the mod's development.
«He didn't just put the 10K bounty. He has been supporting us monetarily throughout the project in addition to the 10K bounty,» AlexMangue says. «Also, he was in some way the director of the project in the way of him doing the creative side of it, like bringing us ideas on what to work on next.»
So far, the mod is able to sync an impressive number of things between players, including player location, weather and time of day, enemy health, and progress through discovered towers and shrines. It is still missing some key features to feel fully complete, though, like syncing enemy AI. In the mod's current form, other players will be able to tell when you've damaged an enemy, but it won't be doing the same thing on their screen as it is on yours. This discrepancy highlights the challenge of pulling off a mod like BotW Multiplayer when access to the game's code isn't really available.
«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,» says AlexMangue. «The main part of this is similar to how cheaters work
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