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The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess fans have finally, natively ported the game to PC and mobile, swinging the doors wide open for mods.
Decompilation efforts for the Nintendo GameCube version of the game started as far back as 2020, and fans finally completed their years-long mission six months back. It took practically no time at all for the group to then pump out a PC port called Dusk that's not just functional, but really damn impressive.
Dusk comes with much higher resolutions and uncapped frame rates, options for gyro aiming while using a bow or grapple, multiple bloom presets, better shadow details, the Wii U version's free cam, the Wii version's mirrored mode, achievements, and difficulty modifiers.
More transformative additions are also included, such as quality-of-life features that can make Link climb ladders faster or quickly skip through text, and cheats that can practically break the game - I imagine both will make the game's notoriously arduous opening slightly easier to get through.
What I'm most excited for, however, are the mods that'll inevitably roll out from here on. The trailer already gives us a taste of what's possible with support for custom models giving Wolf Link new fur coats and, more drastically, replacing this Hylian Link entirely with Linkle or his design from Ocarina of Time.
"So excited to share this with the world," modder Taka Rikka tweets. "This wouldn't have been possible without so many people in the zeldaret / GC decomp community and beyond coming together to dedicate their talent to this. The biggest thanks to all of them."
"When we started the decomp project in August 2020, it was hard to imagine ever finishing, much less seeing it be used for a project like this," they continue. "So many hours of effort were poured into the decomp by many contributors all over the world." They also hint at "future updates" in the pipeline.
Twilight Princess' port is yet another in a fast-growing line of fan-made decompilation projects. Decompiling games involves taking apart their code, making things like unofficial ports possible. Most recently, we've seen the process lead to some incredible preservation tools like the ones that made Sonic Unleashed's Xbox 360 version on PC possible.
