The Witcher 3's official modding toolkit has been available for less than a day, but that hasn't stopped players from creating some wild stuff already, including a recreation of the original game's Vizima, just as the developers intended.
For the uninitiated, developer CD Projekt Red released the REDkit modding tools for The Witcher 3 earlier today, with the aim of giving modders as much power as possible. "This is basically the toolset we used in the development of the game, so the only limit is your imagination," narrative designer Phillip Weber explained in a recent tweet.
Communications manager Carolin Wendt tweeted a challenge for everyone jumping into the game's new creation tools: "Community, don't disappoint me. I want to see the weirdest, boldest, and most fan fiction-y mods from you all."
The Witcher 3's modding community has so far not disappointed. While we wait for the weird and "fan faction-y" mods to crop up, modder AngryCatster ported maps from the original Witcher game into the shiny threequel in all their fuzzy, old-school glory.
The video above has Witcher 3's Geralt model sprinting across the city of Vizima in what the modder calls a "fairly low-effort attempt at porting maps," which has "room for improvement when it comes to improving the visuals." Things like level geometry and object materials were also "scuffed" during the transition.
The speed at which this was done made me think that a fan-made Witcher remake could plausibly come quicker than the official one coming from CDPR and developer Fool's Theory, but according to AngryCatster, doing so would be a major time sink. While the modding tools supposedly let you export geometry into the game, adding in the materials manually "would be immensely tedious and time-consuming," the modder replied in response to a commenter asking about The Witcher 2's regions.
Regardless, pretty much anything is possible in the perennial open-worlder now - from Baldur's Gate 3 characters and Night City vignettes to Geralt's Pro Skater and massive quest mods.
