Now that both versions of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild are available comparisons have inevitably been showcased between the two. One such comparison provided by YouTuber MasterOfHyrule shows that the Wii U version is quicker at loading the many shrines dotted around the vast world and also continuing on after a death.
Wii U Is Faster At Loading Shrines In Zelda Breath Of The Wild Than Switch

how does this make any sense exactly?
WHAT?!!!
Sometimes things are just over analyzed… Meanwhile I’m just enjoying the ride called Breath of the Wild.
I believe it! I’m surprised how amazing it’s running on my Wii U. I was almost positive Nintendo was going to fuck it up after chopping the game two pieces so that they could port it to the switch.
I’m glad to see there may be a couple of advantages playing the game on its native Hardware. there are so many things in the game I can see that were removed from the Wii U version. I guarantee if the Wii U version had all of its original gameplay functionality it would have seriously hurt the switch launch which is obviously why Nintendo gimped the game.
After playing all night long I can say that the game is probably going to be my new favorite Zelda installment.
I really hope Nintendo didn’t put the higher difficulty sitting behind a paywall because I’m definitely going to want to play this game through again.
I have zero complaints about getting the Wii U version. Only thing in general about the game I like is the controller configuration. And the fact that you can’t change it. I’m slowly getting used to it, but I would rather have my dash button on the same side as my jump button. I miss the old days where games let you completely edit your button configuration. But the game is a masterpiece. I’ve played for like twenty hours and only have four hearts. I died many a time, but it’s so fun. I’m not gonna mention specific stuff to avoid spoilers. But I am having a blast with this game.
*don’t like
My first three deaths were from falling. The first was quite embarrassing… :P
I’ve had many fall deaths haha.
Haha my first death was dropping a bomb behind me and detonating it too soon. Blowing me into a freezing river then killing me. It was so glorious!
Epic!
Mine was pretty lame. Walked off the first tower in the game by accident and fell to my death. lol
Same here. I was having too much fun jumping around like an idiot. LOL!
it’s only by 1 second… meh
Right. I mean… more or less it’s almost the exact same experience, except for the small resolution bump for Switch users and a few other things I certainly don’t feel like I’m missing out on.
To me it’s already pretty difficult.
Don’t get me wrong it is definitely difficult enough right now, I actually think they struck a perfect balance as far as the difficulty level goes.
I think in my mind I can see it being easier once I understand how everything works and I have all the moves down pat so a second playthrough I would probably up the difficulty but right now it’s absolutely perfect and I wouldn’t change a thing.
I don’t think I would go for a second playthrough just because of how vast and lengthy the game is. I’d probably just screw around the overworld after I beat the game.
No speed runs to the end game?
I don’t do speed runs.
Hmm. Yeah. I guess I’ll see. Kind of Black flag on WiiU. I jump back in just to sail around and plunder ships and stuff. ;D
Quick question what does the Gamepad do that the Switch doesn’t. Does it show a map or inventory? I’m stuck over if its worth the wait or not
Don’t get me started on this.
And the correct question is “What did the gamepad USED to do that the switch doesn’t.?”
Several things. Did you own a wiiU?
I have a Wii U yes and TPHD and WWHD. I know they scraped a lot of features but what does it do now?
IT doesn’t do jack shit now except play the fucking game.
It just blinks a message that says you can tap the screen to switch to off-screen gameplay. It’s so lame considering it’s blatantly obvious that the Sheikah slate functions were supposed to be on the gamepad. Would have made looking for locations in the photo album much easier if they can just be look at at a glance instead of bringing up the menu.
To be fair, every 1st party game on the WiiU is just a showcase of skilled development. Whether you play Super Mario 3D World with 4 players or Mario Kart 8 in split screen against online opponents and even Bayonetta 2 which wasn’t even an in house production runs and looks like a charm.
Look at Skyward Sword on the Wii and that would have given you an idea of what to expect – only the best.
I guess when they released the WiiU they automatically understood what possibilities this system would enable them to do. And they went all in and created something that might just take full advantage of all hardware aspects (DESPITE THE GAMEPAD THOUGHG, GODDAMMIT). Now porting such a behemoth of taloired software over to a different processing architecture and a different kind of device obviously isn’t so easy and for what I read so far, the Switch version still seems to do perform very good.
In the end it might be a bit sad that, just like Twilight Princess, this one game that was developed over years for the WiiU might sell the most on a different platform. But I’m very excited to see sales of it soon.
You can just skip parts of the load anyway.
The wiiU version takes 30+ extra seconds to load up. Once the Switch is loaded up then waking from sleep mode is instant. Dont get that option with wiiU. The one second difference between load times after death and loading shrines can be excused because of the higher quality of sound. I do miss having the gamepad map, however getting pretty good without the on-screen hud.
Yup. Switch version is best version :)
Hmm… I’m thinking of turning my HUD off…. I don’t think I’m quite ready tho.
The sound quality really isn’t that noticeable and I’ll considering you can potentially die very often the seconds saved start to add up. Still it’s not that big of a difference.
The game is most likely better optimized for the Wii U as it’s a Wii U game ported to switch. I’d it was developed for the switch and ported to Wii U, we’d be seeing the opposite. No big deal. Future games will likely run better.
I’m the person most likely to agree with you here, and for the most part, I do.
That said, I think it was really bastardized to the point advantages one way or the other are mostly neglegable at this point.
So, I’d just tell people to get it for whichever system you have, IMO of course.
So should I get the Switch version or not? Because this is confusing now.
It’s the same game. Get it for switch if portability is really important to you or if you are buying a switch anyway.
But I wouldn’t buy a switch JUST to play Zelda. I’d make sure you have a couple more reasons than that.
but is he plating off carts and disk?
could he be plating both downloaded, if both are downloaded to the maion memory, or he is using a hard drive for the wii u, and a sd card for the switch, and not a very good sd card loading times could end up the same.
I don’t think it matters. Switch owners shouldn’t feel slighted, and WiiU owners get a small bone thrown to them. At the end of the day, I really believe it’s the same game.
I noticed one of the shrines (Shae Loya) is broken as the arrow switch doesn’t stay enabled like in youtube tutorials, probably from patch 1.1 or a repeating bug. Hoping Ninty fix it soon
So far I’ve encountered no problems and the game is phenomenal.
The switch drops in frame rates a lot but not unable drops. The Wii u Zelda was being made first, so it’s clear that the switch is a port
Considering that it’s so hard to port to the Wii U, it’s ironic that it is bad porting from it too. And that’s within the same company. I guess it just goes to show how unique the Wii U’s hardware really was.
The game was first made on the Wii U not switch. It was only considered as a switch title since the Wii u was dead already. That’s why they pushed it back from 2014 to now
The game is amazing.
I don’t understand why the Switch version has to load at all? The things that many people were saying about cartridges Vs discs are turning out to be false. Two of which were that cartridges were cheaper to manufacture, therefore would be cheaper to purchase. FALSE! And the second being, cartridges don’t have to load like discs. FALSE AGAIN!
technology has to load to work. it’s kind of a given. it’s not going to be up in a nanosecond.
^..Because this game is literally an upscaled Wii U version. You are not going to get features if the game is created to take advantage of those features.
I don’t think anybody said cartridges would be cheaper and, if the are, that cost savings would go to the dev, not to you. They can definitely be cheaper than SD cards though because they don’t need to use an controller that does wear leveling for writes. Even if they decided to include some writeable area in the cartridges, it still wouldn’t need a controller because it would standardized to the point that the console could handle it.
The thing about cartridges not having to load only used to be true because early cartridges used mask ROM that was treated like an extension of RAM. Newer cartridges use a type of read-only flash memory and can have much higher bandwidth than discs and use much less power (drive has no moving parts) but are still way slower than memory so they’re treated like a lower tier of memory. However, even if the cartridges had the same bandwidth as the top speed the Wii U drive gets (22MB/s) it would still be quicker because it’s far less latent. 3DS game cards were several thousand times less latent than optical disks so they have much better random access performance which is good for open world games. Random access performance is so bad on optical discs that Bethesda actually had to put duplicate data on the Oblivion disc for PS3 to cut down on random access reads as much as possible.
But it makes me sick with how much a Switch game costs, and they’re so tiny. I couldn’t believe it when I first opened the case of Breath Of The Wild and saw that itty bitty cartridge. I was like, “THIS WAS $60.00?”.
the size of the cartridge has nothing to do with the price…
you do realize that the money you are paying is for the content not the cartilage write ??? or rather most of it.
goddammit, right not write.
Cards are cheaper than Blu-ray or similar tech especially in terms of current game data size, packaging & shipping, and distribution (shelf space).
I’m not sure the game case size of the Switch games, but they sure are lighter now. Those cost benefits will never pass to the consumer.
Yea I would have preferred if they were the size of 3DS cards. When they’re too small they became way too easy to lose and the art work is almost pointless especially when the Switch branding, game ID, and ESRB logo are all squished in.
You forget, even if you go digital and forgo disks cartridges or whatever, you still pay full price for the games. And they also have load times.
@Josh McJunkin,
Yes, and that’s even WORSE. That’s why I think it’s crazy to buy digital. It’s bad enough that the physical games now are nearly invisible. LOL!
i like that when i turn my switch on my t.v. comes on and i’m instantly right where i left off. can’t do that with the wii u.
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