Have you already run out of things to do in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and are thinking about starting a new game? Maybe your partner or sibling wants to start a game of their own? Previous Zelda titles have made allowances for situations just like these, providing up to three save slots so multiple players could track their progress without muddying the save state waters. Zelda: Breath of the Wild extends no such courtesy.
Neither the Switch or Wii U versions of Breath of the Wild allow for more than one playthrough at a time. If you try to start a new game from the main menu, you will be presented with a message that asks if you want to overwrite current save data. Selecting Yes will delete all of your previous saves.
Thankfully, there is a workaround for this issue — simply create another account on your Switch or Wii U console and start the new game over there. The Wii U can hold a maximum of 12 accounts, while the Switch can support up to eight and you don’t need to bind these accounts to a Nintendo Account if you don’t want to.
Further, if you buy the game’s Expansion Pass DLC on any profile that is Nintendo Account enabled, all of your unlinked profiles on the same console will have access to it too.
We hope this information will be of use to, particularly when Nintendo drops the game’s forthcoming Hard Mode update. There’s no word currently on whether players will be able to switch to Hard Mode mid-playthrough or whether they will have to start fresh.
———-
