Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are getting Switch 2 upgrades

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom fans will be able to see the era-defining Nintendo titles in a new light on Nintendo Switch 2 with a duo of enhanced visual upgrades, Nintendo announced Wednesday during its Nintendo Direct presentation about the new console. If you already own the game, you won’t automatically have the Switch 2 version and will need to purchase an upgrade pack to get it.

The Switch 2 version of each game will include a “Zelda Notes” feature, which will provide game tips to players; you can use this Switch 2-only feature via the Nintendo Switch app on smart devices. It can help you find Korok seeds, for example. That’s in addition to enhanced resolution and frame rates and HDR support.

Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom have earned their place among the greatest video games of all time, and delivered on the promise of a truly open-world Zelda game where you could see a mountain in the distance and then go climb it. Both games managed this feat on the Switch, which, as a device designed for both big-screen and handheld play, was significantly underpowered compared to the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One (and later, the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X).

Of course, this experience wasn’t without its compromises; at launch for Breath of the Wild, certain areas of the world exhibited notable performance problems, especially when played in the Switch’s docked mode. Less than a month later, Nintendo issued a patch that made significant improvements but didn’t completely alleviate frame-rate drops below 30 frames per second.

Now, the Switch 2’s beefed-up hardware will be able to render Breath of the Wild’s version of Hyrule with a much fuller degree of fidelity and fluidity.