Is The Zelda: Breath Of The Darkness And Switch 2 Rumor True?

Depending on where you get your news, you may have heard about a supposed leak for the sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. This leak purports to give the game a real title — or something close to one — along with a release date. And it also makes some awfully big claims about Nintendo's next console; like, the one after the Nintendo Switch.

You may be wondering: is this leak legit? It is truly spilling the beans about the Breath of the Wild sequel and Nintendo's follow-up to its Switch console? We'll answer that question in just a moment. But first, we'll go over what the leak entailed, just in case you missed it.

It all stems from a 4chan user by the name of Xhyll, who told others on the message board a few days ago about information Xhyll had supposedly received from a former employee at Nintendo. According to Xhyll, this former employee was in the know about a closed-doors demonstration of the Nintendo Switch 2 shown to members of Nintendo's marketing department. The demo showed The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild running in 4K at 60 frames per second, as well as gameplay of the next Zelda title, which the source claims is called The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Darkness.

Breath of the Darkness is slated to be a launch game for the Nintendo Switch 2, and according to that former Nintendo employee, both the game and the new system will arrive in January 2021. On top of all of that, the Switch 2 will purportedly be intended for home use only, backtracking on the "Switch" promise of a home console-slash-portable hybrid.

This all sounds a bit unbelievable, doesn't it? Most of the folks on the 4chan thread seemed to think so, as well, with one person stating, "This is something Nintendo would quite literally never do," and another adding, "I'll believe it when I see it." A third asked, "What compels a person to make a thread like this?" And really, all of them echo our sentiments exactly.

There have been quite a few "leaks" floating around various message boards lately that are outright fakes designed specifically to garner news coverage. And this has all the telltale signs of being another one. It's a leak from a mostly anonymous user. It cites an inside source who is no longer at the company (in this case, Nintendo). And it reads like a wish list. It's the same format many of the more recent Rockstar "leaks" have used; the ones that have been proven false.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Darkness sounds like a made-up name from someone who saw the same trailer everyone else did for the Breath of the Wild sequel and went, "ooh, that's dark." The game launching as a title for a Nintendo Switch 2 would anger a lot of current Nintendo Switch owners who (quite fairly) understood the game to be a same-system follow-up for the Zelda title that launched that console. The idea that Nintendo would release a home-only Nintendo Switch seems crazy at this point, given the success of the Switch hybrid and the amount of content the company has been able to pump out by combining its home and portable development efforts. A Nintendo console — especially a compact machine — doing 4K graphics at 60 frames per second is laughable when you consider that the larger Xbox One X is still choosing 4K or 60 frames per second in many titles.

And it also seems likely we'll see a "Switch Pro" a lot sooner than 2021. So really, this entire thing seems bunk. If you ask us, there's probably no truth to find in this latest leak whatsoever, and you're better off disregarding it.

Should we get some actual news on the Breath of the Wild sequel or the next Nintendo console, however, we'll fill you in.