Do you remember the horse races in The Witcher 3? You know, the kind where you definitely didn’t fail a few times because you got stuck on posts, trees, or low fences while trying to sneak around corners. Well, CD Projekt actually cut some of those boat races from the final version of the game, and now a modder has managed to restore them.
How is this possible? Well, thanks to the game’s relatively new REDkit modification tool, players can use many of the same content that the studio used when it originally created the game itself.
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The name of this mod is “Rowing”, and modder MerseyRockoff has resurrected the boat racing competition that CD Projekt originally researched and planned during the development of TW3, but unlike the horse racing and bare-knuckle brawls we know and love, this mod did not appear in the final version.
“With the release of the REDkit, 100% of the boat race script in the game files was recovered, which allowed the restoration process to begin,” the modder explained. “Only the text and audio files were found, the rest was created from scratch based on CDPR’s writing and careful inspection of the files. This means that all dialogues, characters, announcements, and journal entries in the mod were originally written by CDPR, but I recreated and brought them to life using the REDkit.”
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As you can see in the video above, there are four races in total, two of which take place on the waterways around Novigrad and Oxenfurt, while the others have Gerry race around the Skellige Sea near Celtic Troald and around the southern Faroe Islands. These quests are triggered via ads on nearby notice boards, which you should be used to by now, just follow the routes. Alternatively, you can bypass the middleman and just talk to whoever is organizing/running the relevant race to start the race.
While these races may currently resemble those in the original game, MerseyRockoff has future plans to offer randomized routes for races and allow you to repeat them after completing your initial run, which sounds like it could turn this one-off thrill into a perfect new hobby/side job for White Wolf.
This is far from the only impressive thing that’s been done with the REDkit so far, one of the game’s original developers used it to give us an alternate version of one of the best quests in the Blood and Wine expansion, and a modder ported a rudimentary version of the original Witcher’s Vizima to 3.
