Anyone who has diligently modded The Witcher has probably also appeared on CD Projekt Red’s radar.
CD Projekt Red is relying more on modders for its next games. Associate Game Director Pawel Sasko confirmed this in an interview. For example, today’s Senior Quest Designer Eero Varendi was actually just trying to remake The Witcher (1) – and was promptly recruited.
From the Australian farm to Polish game development
As Sasko said in the conversation with FlowGaming According to Varendi, his main job was as a farmer in Australia. He also modded in his free time and published a video in which he recreated the prologue of The Witcher (1) in The Witcher 3.
Nowadays, thanks to Mod Kit, even more is possible:
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REDKit for The Witcher 3: A virtual taster tour with Sören
The clip found its way onto Sasko’s screen, who was so impressed by the quality that he tracked down the modder. And indeed, Varendi passed an aptitude test and moved from Australia to Poland to start working at CD Projekt.
Sea LinkedIn He started as a Junior Quest Designer in 2018 and has held a senior position on the new Witcher game since 2023.
According to Sasko, a large part of the development team for Cyberpunk Orion, the successor to Cyberpunk 2077, consists of modders:
The Orion quest team, the people who build the quests in the game, consists of about 24 people. Half of them are former modders. (…) Really, some of the best people we have used to be modders.
Some of them have dealt with completely different games than Witcher or Cyberpunk, such as StarCraft. In general, Sasko strongly recommends You should learn how to mod if you want to work as a developer later.
In the same interview, he talked about the development phase of CD Projekt Red’s upcoming games:
The RedKit, the official modding tools for The Witcher, were also created in cooperation between CD Projekt and modders.
How many of you mod in your free time? Which games do you like to work on the most? Or do you prefer to enjoy the finished works of modders and browse through Nexusmods and the like? Feel free to write to us in the comments!
