Choose Your Own Protagonist with This Sekiro Costume Pack

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice brings FromSoftware’s signature combat to feudal Japan. It has everything fans of the developer expect — white-knuckle combat, arcane lore, hulking bosses — but none of its robust aesthetic customization. Modders like Zullie the Witch have stepped in to help, adding some variety when it comes to watching protagonist Wolf dart around on the screen. Their mod is a costume pack that replace Wolf’s model with non-player characters like the healer Emma, the Basket Wearer Shosuke, Tengu of Ashina, a giant frog, a terrifying monkey, and more. We spoke with Zullie about the project.

How long have you been modding? 
Since around mid-2014, a couple of months after Dark Souls II was released on PC.

What got you interested in modding?
I got started using Cheat Engine, which is great for making quick modifications and immediately seeing them in action. Cheat Engine is a live memory editor, so you can change things while the game is running and watch the effects without any delay. Having a method of instantly messing around with how a game works proved to be very appealing.

The first thing I ever used Cheat Engine for was to change the name of my character in Dark Souls II to "Zullie the Witch", which ended up accidentally shaping my whole internet persona. At the time, we had themed fight club events, where players would fight each other with characters built around central ideas, and one of the themes was cosplaying a character. I chose to cosplay as Zullie and it stuck harder than anyone could've anticipated.

Why did you want to make this costume pack?
Partly just because I had learned how to do the method I used for model replacement while messing around with Dark Souls Remastered and thought it would be a nice practical application of what I'd figured out. Also important though was the fact that Sekiro doesn't have any character customization by default, so I knew it would be something people would appreciate.

There are a lot of costume/model replacement mods for Sekiro. Do you have any favorites?
It might be cheating to count it since it's not publicly available, but my friend TKGP manually imported the Black Witch Hat model from Dark Souls III into Sekiro for me before the tools for importing models had been developed, which took some commendable effort on his part and really meant a lot to me. There's no way I could choose anything else.

Are you planning on adding any other costumes?
Probably not. The method I was using was pretty technically crude, so I really only did it to fill the void until the real model importing tools were finished.

If you could add one boss, no restrictions, to Sekiro, what would it be?
That's a very tough one. Demon's Souls was quite a long time ago, and before FromSoftware had built up a lot of experience making these kinds of games, so some of the bosses that seemed really amazing back then don't feel so imposing now looking back on them. Still, I'd like them to bring back False King Allant, just to see how much they could improve him now with over a decade of experience.

This interview was edited for clarity.

Recommended Specs:

• OS: Windows® 10 (64-bit)
• CPU: Intel® Core™ i5-2500k
• RAM: 8GB of system memory
• Graphics card: NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 970 or AMD® Radeon™ RX 570
• Storage: 25GB of available space
• DirectX: Version 11