There’s no word on whether you’ll be able to turn on hard mode in a current playthrough, or if you’ll have to start fresh. Nintendo has already announced that it will add a “hard mode” to the game with its first post-launch expansion, which is scheduled to be released this summer. This doesn’t only cause problems for people who want to give, say, their child a Breath of the Wild playthrough of their own. It’s unclear if this is how the Switch handles all games at a system level, or if it’s specific to Breath of the Wild we’ve reached out to Nintendo for more details, and we’ll update this article with any information we receive.Īll the Nintendo accounts you need for your Switch This isn’t uncommon behavior - there are games across all kinds of platforms that limit you to one playthrough at a time.

(The game keeps multiple autosaves, but you can only maintain one manual save game.) It’s possible to misinterpret that note, so we’ll be explicit for you: Starting a new game in Breath of the Wild will delete all of your old game’s save files. If you’ve begun playing the game and you select “New Game” from the main menu, you’ll see this message pop up: The “New Game” prompt in the Switch version of Breath of the Wild. Let this be a warning and a public service announcement: That is not the case with Breath of the Wild, whether on the Switch or the Wii U.

Most Zelda games have allowed you to maintain multiple concurrent save files, so it would be reasonable to believe you could do the same here. But if you’ve run out of things to do - or, say, your significant other wants to begin their own adventure - you might want to start a new game. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild offers a Hyrulian playground with seemingly endless opportunities for exploration.

Wii save game progress