Breath Of The Wild “street view” lets you explore Zelda

I want more Hyrule but I can’t wait Breath of the Wild 2? You’re lucky. You can now explore Link’s infamous playgrounds without a Switch.

Last week, a computer science student who uses the YouTube handle Nassim’s Software released a three-dimensional viewer of various The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the wild locations, like Google Maps Street View. For the most part, the website works as you would expect. Click on a location on the map and enjoy a 360-degree first-person glimpse of that area in Hyrule. If you’ve used Street View before, using Nassim’s site will be a snap. More importantly, you can take in some of the absolutely stunning views that the designers at Nintendo have achieved with the game.

However, not all areas of Hyrule are available on the site. Still, if you’ve ever wanted to take a closer look at Hyrule Field, the Grand Plateau, or the Zodobon Highlands, you’ll be able to zoom in at your leisure. Nassim also opened the site for submissions, so you can also go through the tedious creation of a Google Maps Street View version of the ruins of Castle Town.

The steps to create the map aren’t particularly easy, as you can imagine. First, the student downloaded a Wii U emulator called Cemu, allowing him to play the game without a user interface, i.e. without a link. Then they took a bunch of screenshots and threw them into a photo collation, which created a seemingly rotating image.

In the accompanying YouTube video, Nassim says they decided to do this project when they “thought it would be really nice to be able to gaze at video game cards because some of them are really breathtaking.” . Looks like Nassim wanted to incorporate the work of the game designers without having certain elements of the game getting in the way. If so, they’ve chosen a great game for their trial.

Stroll through Hyrule here.

[via VICE]