The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom seems to have leaked a few weeks before its May 12 release. The game is being streamed on Twitch and Discord, while actual copies have reportedly been leaked online, according to a Kotaku story.
A Tears of the Kingdom stream on Twitch was reasonably easy to spot among the 300 or so channels that were broadcasting Breath of the Wild. It can be challenging to distinguish a Tears of the Kingdom broadcast from a Breath of the Wild one at first glance because the two games share the same art style, user interface, and in-game locations.
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Massive leak
It's slightly unbelievable, but completely true, that anyone with a powerful enough PC may now play one of the most eagerly awaited games of the year more than a week before its official launch—and for free. The ROM files themselves are only 15–16 GB and include a tonne of performance and supporting firmware upgrades for smoother emulation, however, it appears that only the Ryujinx emulator can run it at a consistent speed.
Interestingly, the situation has another twist: Some Reddit users assert that all NSP format downloads are forgeries and that only XCI files can be successfully emulated. Numerous videos of the emulated game playing at 60 frames per second have so far been posted online. For obvious reasons, SVG will not link to these shared or illegally downloaded files or films.
What did Nintendo say?
Nintendo hasn't yet made a formal remark on the situation but it appears that it is at least aware of the ROM leak itself. Players who attempted to stream the PC emulator had their streams quickly interrupted.
Nintendo may or may not conduct a similar Discord search as it did with the artbook leakers, but one thing is for certain: Fans who want to hold off on spoilers until launch day must be more watchful than ever.
