Well, it’s been less than 24 hours since CD Projekt made its new REDkit modding tool for The Witcher 3 available to players. Naturally, someone has already tried to port a lot of the areas that made up the city of Vizima in the first Witcher game over to 3 .
If you’re not in the know, REDKIT is designed to give people who mod CDPR’s masterpiece unprecedented power, with access to many of the same tools the studio originally used to create the game itself. That includes the ability to create new quests, or in this case, add entirely new areas.
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The latter, then, is exactly what modder AngryCatster attempted to do with some of the maps from the first Witcher game, porting them over to The Witcher 3 just to see how it would work. While they admit that it was a “rather inefficient attempt” to bring these areas into the new game, what they ended up with was essentially an empty version of Vizima for Geralt to explore.
The four areas that have been ported over are Vizima’s Temple District, the Trade District, Old Vizima, and the levee connecting the two, and gone are all the loading screens you’d encounter when moving between these areas in the first game – making for a much more seamless tour of the Temerian capital without NPCs.
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However, as AngryCatster outlines in the mod description, a lot of work needs to be put into making the area look and work like locations from the original game, with a lot of geometry and textures currently not working properly, plus “since the original game didn’t have much vertical mobility, it’s easy to go out of bounds.”
So does this mean that there’s a chance that other iconic maps or locations from the series could be brought over to The Witcher 3 and developed into a fully operational state? Well, sadly, it sounds like that would still require a huge amount of effort to achieve.
“REDkit 2 has an option to export entire level geometry to a common format, which can then be imported into TW3,” AngryCatster replied to a commenter asking if they would be able to port over areas from The Witcher 2, “However, materials are not exported and adding them back manually would be very tedious and time consuming. Loading a world or any TW2 asset into REDkit 3 will throw an error that the asset version is too low or something similar. I guess the file formats have changed too much between games to be backwards compatible.”
This modder isn’t the only one making cool content to test out The Witcher 3’s new modding tools, one of the game’s original developers has also used them to give us an alternate version of one of the best quests in the Blood and Wine expansion pack.
