Twitch chat beats Breath of the Wild

Popular content creator PointCrow played Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on his Twitch stream, but with a twist. The controls for the game were shared between the streamer and Twitch chat at five-minute intervals.

It took the Twitch chat and PointCrow over 25 hours to complete the challenge, with around 17 hours of that controlled directly by his viewers. The stream peaked at around 600 viewers engaging in the unique experiment.

PointCrow is known for attempting quirky runs of Breath of the Wild such as completing the game without walking. Last week, he challenged his chat to this unique partnership.

Twitch Plays as a concept was invented all the way back in 2014, when an anonymous programmer set up commands that allowed the Twitch chat to (semi) democratically control Pokemon Red through typing commands in the chat. By some miracle, after just over two weeks of play time the Twitch chat was able to complete the game. This spawned all sorts of similar projects, with this Breath of the Wild run being the latest version of the interactive concept.

The control system for the Twitch Plays Breath of the Wild event was similar to those past Twitch Plays events. Players could do any of the basic commands like moving, attacking, and jumping. Additionally, several macros were set up to complete moves like parry, which ensured the chat had all the necessary tools to succeed.

Despite what some may assume, Pointcrow wasn’t always very helpful. Like a big brother messing with his younger sibling, PointCrow often intentionally trolled chat by placing them in front of high level enemies, often leading to the chat frantically fleeing when they were outmatched. In the end, however, it was not the enemies that would kill Link repeatedly. Instead, the vast majority of the deaths throughout the run were from fall damage.

When PointCrow was not trolling his fans, he did step in to ensure that the chat didn’t get stuck on the same part of the game for hours at a time. Boss fights in particular were a challenge with hundreds of people trying to input commands. In many ways, it seemed unlikely that a game with so many complex mechanics and difficult boss fights could be completed in such a chaotic way. Nonetheless, the Twitch chat was able to clumsily defeat Ganon in the final fight with a significant amount of help from PointCrow himself.