The race to perfectly emulate Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is on, and already extremely promising
All of Nintendo's pre-launch trailers for Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom showed off Link flying through the sky and exploring a new archipelago of sky islands floating over Hyrule. It's safe to say the sky is a pretty important part of the game, so it's only fitting that the developers behind Switch emulator Yuzu fixed the clouds first.
«Fix Tears of the Kingdom flickering clouds and depths geometry,» reads the update, logged around 4 pm Pacific time. Zelda wasn't out in the US until 9 pm Pacific, but its global midnight launch meant that with an Australian or Japanese Switch account, the emulator developers could already have their hands on it—without touching the pirated copies of the game floating around for the last two weeks.
«We only begin working on emulating new titles once we can legally acquire and dump them ourselves,» says Bunnei, Yuzu's project lead. «Since Nintendo Switch releases are region-based, we become legally able to work on them as soon as the title becomes available somewhere in the world. Most issues with TotK in Yuzu (thus far) have been fixed with minor changes that were quick to debug and easy to resolve. I think the fact that the community was able to solve many of these challenges with mods well ahead of us is evidence to that.»
Bunnei is referring to the patches and custom emulator builds that have been distributed on piracy subreddits and Discords ever since Tears of the Kingdom's leak. They've been a real mess for the emulation developers, causing blanket bans on discussing Tears of the Kingdom emulation in the Discord servers of Yuzu and Ryujinx until release. Now that the game is officially out there the general chat channels of both servers are flooded with Zelda talk, and the emulator
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