Zelda Breath of the Wild player immortalizes Hero’s Path with in-game map wall art

The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild released in March of 2017 as a launch game for Nintendo Switch. It quickly became one of the highest rated games of all time and is widely considered to be one the best games Nintendo (or anyone for that matter) has ever made.

Players are still searching every corner of the map to find new secrets, max-out their character builds and more. While it can be hard to say goodbye to these experiences once we have completely exhausted the content within, one Zelda player has thought of a very interesting way to immortalize their time in Hyrule…

Despite the plethora of new game plus-style content that Breath of the Wild has inherently built-in to it, not to mention all the new DLC, eventually we have to just give Link a rest.

Ever since Nintendo dropped the first bit of DLC for the game, BOTW has implemented a system known as the Hero’s Path that essentially tracks your journeys across Hyrule on the in-game map. It is a cool feature and can help you remember where you have been (and not been) when searching for rare items, but it is otherwise mostly for show.

My partner and I sunk hundreds of hours into Zelda BotW, and enjoyed every minute. I wanted to immortalize our playthrough somehow, and the Hero’s Path DLC feature gave me an idea for how to do it.

One player, by the name of Kazoodac, recently spent hours on a quest to immortalize their time in the game with a very unique piece of artwork. In fact, it is a composite image of Kazoodac’s Hero’s Path from the in-game map that was then printed out (in as high a quality as possible) and framed. Just the map itself is an interesting idea for some wall art, but the Hero’s Path adds an awesome personal touch to the whole thing.

This wasn’t quite as easy as it might sound though. To create as large and high-resolution of an image as possible, Kazoodac took hundreds of individual screenshots, slowly edging across the world map with the joystick, until everything was accounted for. From there, all 200 or so images were slowly stitched together in Photoshop, offering a nice landscape-style and zoomed-out version of Kazoodac’s in-game journey.

I used the Switch’s screenshot feature and Photoshop’s photomerge tool to recreate the entire map with our entire playthrough trail overlayed on top of it.

Here’s a look at the full image before printing:

This tactic resulted in a much higher res image that ended up at about 5842 x 4868. It was then printed at 16 x 20/300 dpi and framed. This was apparently about as painstaking as it sounds, according to Kazoodac’s Imgur post:

I ended up taking more screenshots than I probably needed…Even then, I did need to go back once or twice and take screenshots of little gaps that I’d missed. This did come in handy for removing the green cursors in the center of every image though.

Needless to say, the results are pretty amazing and any hardcore BOTW fan would appreciate this kind of thing. Just depends how many hours you’re willing to put into making one.

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