Tucked amidst the Soulsborne fan community is a small group of dedicated modders who use their mastery of computer programming to manipulate FromSoftware’s games in all sorts of ways. For the most part, said manipulation involves digging up unused content in games like Dark Souls Remastered and Bloodborne, but modder Zullie the Witch recently kicked off a new project that’s a little more…fun.
By manipulating the values for specific non-playable character models, Zullie the Witch was able to “graft” certain enemy textures onto Dark Souls’ playable avatar. The below tweet from Zullie’s official Twitter account shows off a playable skeleton in action, but if you browse her full Twitter feed, you can also see other successful attempts which allowed her to control a crystal golem, one of the snakemen from Sen’s Fortress, and even a bizarre humanoid version of the game’s normally quite diminutive crystal lizards.
I was able to almost completely rebind an NPC model to the player skeleton. Haven't quite figured out the fingers, but I'll probably get there. pic.twitter.com/NYiQIhSSzk
— Zullie (@ZullieTheWitch) June 25, 2018
Interestingly enough, Zullie the Witch says that most of the skeleton textures she repurposed didn’t come from the standard skeleton enemies, but instead came from the infamous “Bonewheel” enemies whose surprising speed and damage-dealing abilities have proven to be quite the headache for many a Dark Souls player. Sadly, as Zullie noted in her tweets, the Bonewheel model’s hands lack proper articulation, so the playable skeleton’s model always has its hands in the “open” position even when holding a weapon.
If you head on over to Zullie’s YouTube page, you can find plenty of videos detailing the content that was cut from games such as Dark Souls Remastered and Dark Souls 3. It turns out there was a lot of stuff that FromSoftware left on the cutting room floor, stuff which includes armor sets, weapons, character gestures, and even entire enemy types. And of course there are also plenty of videos in which Zullie messes with each game’s code to produce hilariously wacky results.