Piracy, malware, and confusion have dominated the last week as the real release date draws near.
In just over a week, leaked copies of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom have caused a degree of chaos that even Ganon would be impressed with.
In late April, I spoke with developers behind the Switch emulators Yuzu and Ryujinx about the likelihood of their emulators being able to run Tears of the Kingdom shortly after launch. The prognosis was optimistic. But then the game leaked well ahead of launch, putting the developers—as well as Nintendo—in a tense and volatile situation.
The emulation teams have forbidden all discussion of running Tears of the Kingdom from their Discord servers—Yuzu only allows vague discussion of the contents of the game, but requests for help or discussion of performance quickly earns chatters a deleted message and a warning or ban. To avoid being involved with pirated material, the emulator developers have vowed, at least publicly, not to release updates targeting issues with Tears of the Kingdom. «We are waiting for the game to release, so that members of our team can each legally dump their own copies of the game,» Yuzu lead developer Bunnei told me on Monday.
The people pirating The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom two weeks early aren’t so patient.
On subreddits like the brazenly titled r/NewYuzuPiracy, new «fixes» for the game seem to pop up every few hours, claiming to offer improved performance or cures for crashes or graphical glitches. There’s a «30 fps patch,» a «60 fps patch,» the «cloudfix» and others targeting specific bits of Tears of the Kingdom that pose issues for the official versions of the emulators. These files are distributed across file hosting sites like Mediafire and Pixeldrain, with each Reddit post linking to virus scanning sites to «prove» they’re clean of trojans or other nasty malware that started popping up in the first few days after Tears of the Kingdom’s leak on piracy sites.
