These beautiful Zelda: Breath of the Wild panoramas needed a Phrenic bow, 100s of screenshots, and a custom program

Even after dozens of hours in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, I still frequently pause on mountain bluffs or hillsides to appreciate the view. I thought that kind of experience was inherently transitory; the sort of thing you could never really capture outside of the game itself. But these beautiful panoramas by Andy Teijelo Pérez are coming awfully close to proving me wrong.

Just as interesting as the end product is the process used to create them. Each panorama is made with upwards of a hundred in-game screen captures. Pérez uses a combination of careful virtual photography techniques (which just so happen to eschew the actual in-game camera tool in favor of the zoom-able Phrenic Bow) and open-source programs to photograph all the details then stitch them together flawlessly.

The resulting images are almost as good as spending a few peaceful minutes on the side of Satori Mountain. And this way you don't have to worry about getting jumped by stalfos.

Keep reading with our look at how Zelda: Breath of the Wild is shaping the future of games.

Connor Sheridan

I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and now I'm a staff writer here at GamesRadar.