I'm new to speedrunning and I've yet to find a game I want to speedrun, but I was considering trying the Breath of the Wild Great Plateau for my first run. I don't know a lot about speedrunning and almost nothing about timing or recording a run so some help would be greatly appreciated!

Hello,

Breath Of The Wild has a forum and a discord ( https://www.speedrun.com/botw/forum ) which will probably be better resources for you to ask specifically for that game.

In a broad sense, if you can stream your game to a PC you can broadcast on Twitch and use a combination of Livesplit and OBS to display times while doing so. You "split" your times by pressing a certain key (either on your PC keyboard, or on your controller, or some people even buy special hardware just for splitting) and can run and time your game that way.

After your Twitch stream ends, it saves for two weeks. What you will need to do is either use Twitch's "Highlight" function to create a clip of your actual speedrun, which will save indefinitely, or what most people do is Download the stream then edit it and upload it to Youtube.

Now that is just some basic, broad advice. Other people simply set up a camera (or even a phone) and video record their TV screen. Some people do the Twitch/Youtube route but don't use livesplit, and you can just time your run afterwards. There are a lot of different ways to do it.

Going back to my original point though, it is best to ask the specific game community that you are planning to play, as they may have specific rules about recording / timing your run. I don't play BOTW so I don't know for sure, but I hope this has helped you in getting started.

Since BotW runs on the Nintendo Switch, the preferred method of recording would be purchasing a HDMI capture card and connecting that to your computer. However, these can be expensive, so I would check with the game's community if you instead just want to point a camera at your screen. (I expect they'll be lenient.)