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Zelda: Breath of the Wild VR conversion mod with full 6DOF is imminent

Breath of the Wild's BetterVR mod allows for full traversal of Hyrule in first-person 6DOF Virtual Reality. (Image Source: Crementif)
Breath of the Wild's BetterVR mod allows for full traversal of Hyrule in first-person 6DOF Virtual Reality. (Image Source: Crementif)
In two days, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild will be playable in fully-immersive 6DOF VR, complete with support for other mods, just in time for New Year 2026. There's also a third-person mode, for those who want to utilize an immersive VR playspace with more traditional controls.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is one of Nintendo's biggest hits across Wii U, Nintendo Switch, and Nintendo Switch 2—but none of those versions of the game support full 6DOF (six degrees of freedom, or full head-tracking) VR. It wasn't until Nintendo Switch 2 that the game actually ran at 60 FPS on Nintendo's own hardware—but over in the PC space, the Cemu Wii U emulator has pushed the game above and beyond the possibilities of its original hardware, and now the effort to turn Breath of the Wild into a fully-fledged PC experience has culminated in a full Breath of the Wild VR conversion.

The Breath of the Wild BetterVR mod still supports combat in first-person, including BOTW's signature shield parries. (Image Source: Crementif)
The Breath of the Wild BetterVR mod still supports combat in first-person, including BOTW's signature shield parries. (Image Source: Crementif)

Through the Breath of the Wild BetterVR mod, one of Nintendo's biggest hits can now be played in full virtual reality, featuring full motion controls, 6DOF head tracking, and all you would expect from an immersive VR game. Melee combat, paragliding, shield-surfing, and all the unique moves available to Breath of the Wild players can now be experienced in VR. The BetterVR mod isn't just limited to a first-person VR conversion, either—it also allows for third-person gameplay, should you want to keep things more traditional while still immersing yourself fully in Hyrule. And yes—you can still pet the dogs.

While the mod is open source and will of course be made freely-available in less than 48 hours at the time of writing, there are some caveats. Like with all emulation projects, the onus is on you to acquire and rip your own legal copy of the game to play it within the Cemu Wii U emulator. You'll need a reasonably-beefy CPU to run the game well after that, and need to install additional mods in order to make it playable at 60+ FPS, which is integral for a good experience in VR, where low framerate can be nausea-inducing.

But for players who can rise up to meet that technical challenge and who have all the requisite hardware, the launch of Breath of the Wild BetterVR. The mod developer also notes that AMD GPUs may not be supported at launch, and driver bugs prevented the mod from working at all on their AMD test system. AMD CPUs will work fine, though, with good results reported on both an Intel Core i9-13900K paired with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 and an AMD Ryzen 5 7600X with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060.

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> Expert Reviews and News on Laptops, Smartphones and Tech Innovations > News > News Archive > Newsarchive 2025 12 > Zelda: Breath of the Wild VR conversion mod with full 6DOF is imminent
Christopher Harper, 2025-12-28 (Update: 2025-12-28)