A fan-made mod for The Witcher 3 adds a prologue of the first game’s events remade in the new engine. It’s short but sweet.
Not many people have played the first Witcher game, and there’s a reason for that. The look and feel have not aged well at all, especially for anyone trying to revisit the series origins after falling in love with The Witcher 3. You’d be hard pressed to recognize 2007’s Geralt compared to the chiseled sex icon he’s become. Fortunately, there’s now a mod that offers a glimpse of what the old game could look like rendered in today’s technology.
Compliments of user Erxv, the mod adds a prologue to the current game which offers players an idea of the events from the first one. As someone who began the series when The Witcher 2 was ported to the Xbox 360, I played through the third game only being able to guess at most characters backgrounds. To its credit, I think The Witcher 3 does an excellent job of cluing you into people’s back stories without throwing their entire life’s story at you, but afterwards I certainly wanted to know more about people like Vesemir and Geralt’s other witcher friends who didn’t make an appearance in the second game.
Erxv’s mod not only recreates scenes from the first game in the new engine, it also adds voice overs. The entire thing’s took them almost a year to complete but the results speak for themselves (even if, as Erxv points out, some scenes could still use some work). Here’s Vesemir, Geralt’s mentor, from the first game for instance.
And here he is in the new prologue.
Normally, I love to see studios take a break from what they’ve done in the past to focus on new and original projects. But as interested as I am to see what comes of CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077, there’s nothing I’d rather see right now than more of the Witcher series. Despite only being DLC, Blood and Wine was my game of 2016, and I would have loved to have seen more done with the amazing world created in The Witcher 3.
Even if that’s not in the cards though, and the studio has no plans to return to the series for The Witcher 4, it’s at least heartening to see fans continue to support the game with new and interesting mods. Maybe some of them will even convince CD Projekt to find time for a true remake of The Witcher 1.