A fight in the Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom mod scene has revealed the ugly side of emulation fandom

pcgamer.com:

In the week since Tears of the Kingdom's release, modders have been working tirelessly to pick apart the game's code and tune up its inner workings. Every day there's seemingly a new iteration of a dynamic framerate mod that brings the dream of a perfect 60 fps a little more within reach. But the ravenous appetite for those improvements has come at the cost of drama in the Switch modding scene, with one of the best-known modders stepping back from creating mods and effectively shutting his Discord.

Modder theboy181 is responsible for a majority of the patches listed on the Yuzu emulator's website, which make a range of enhancements to popular Switch games. Some enable games to render in 21:9 or 32:9 ultrawide, or disable visual features like motion blur. Others—probably the most popular—double 30 fps games to 60 fps. Last November theboy181's 60 fps mod for Pokemon Scarlet went viral on Twitter, racking up 22,000 retweets.

Theboy181 started looking into Tears of the Kingdom's code last Friday, once the game was released—though by then mods created by players who had pirated the game were downloadable with early attempts to conquer the 30 fps cap and other limitations. «My process is, if I like a game, I buy it. And then I want to put it on my PC and make it look as good as possible for my own personal means,» theboy181 told me in an interview on Monday. «Doing that in the past, I've shared things publicly after I've had time to play them and know they're quality mods.»

This process has worked for theboy181 for a number of mods in the past—but when the game in question is one of the fastest-selling of all time, you're dealing with a different crowd.

Tears of the Kingdom has an impatient contingent of fans hungry for every