The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is highly touted as one of the greatest games in recent memory. But one YouTuber felt like it was missing something important that would push it over the edge: Multiplayer. They issued a challenge to anyone that can modify Breath of the Wild, though the challenge is now being criticized on social media.
The content creator and Breath of the Wild speedrunner PointCrow felt that Breath of the Wild felt empty at times and issued a $10,000 challenge to anyone that could make a mod that will allow for 2 to 4 players to inhabit the world among a host of other things they wanted to add to the game's sandbox. Game developers and other notable figures are criticizing the audacity of the challenge as well as the "prize" money being offered for the amount of work needed and some of the stipulations of the bounty.
Sam Sharma, Director of Product at Bungie, posted a screenshot of the headline from TheGamer and criticized the challenge. His stance lies in how the broader gaming community doesn't understand how hard and expensive game development is, with plenty of examples like Fable being delayed or under development for years. One tweet from Danny O'Dwyer of the gaming documentary YouTube channel "NoClip" piggybacks off of Sharma's criticism stating that some game development pundits "tend to say what fans want to hear," calls himself out for the practice in the past, and cites his years of seeing what goes into game development for his channel.
Others are scoffing at the prize money, calling $10,000 a joke in terms of the work needed to make Breath of a Wild capable of multiplayer, with some devs claiming that the prize money alone barely gets assets done. The effort and hours of development work it would take to essentially rebuild the game would exceed the winning purse money. A final nail in this game development coffin would be that the game being talked about is a Nintendo IP and it is ruthless about any modifications to its games. With the stipulation that PointCrow wants exclusive streaming rights from the winner, it sets them up to potentially profit off the mod and Nintendo would come sniffing for its cut.
There are some fans that are defending the spirit of the challenge, citing PointCrow's history of playing games modders have done to other single-player open-world games like Sekiro and The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim. The latter, of course, is well known to be a modder's playground and Bethesda tends to be more open to modding than Nintendo is. Defenders also claim that these modders have been doing it mostly for free for other games, so an incentive to make a Breath of the Wild Multiplayer mod is a good deal.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is now available on Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Wii U.