Witcher 3 modder resurrects the boat races CD Projekt cut from the base game, just in case you want to give Roach a break
You've beaten The Continent's fastest jockeys, now it's time to take to the water.
You remember The Witcher 3's horse races? You know, the ones you definitely didn't fail a couple of times by getting stuck on a pole, tree, or low fence trying to cheekily cut a corner. Well, CD Projekt actually cut a number of boat races along the same lines from the game's final release, and a modder's now managed to restore them.
How? Well, with a bit of help from the game's still relatively new REDkit modding tool, which gives folks access to a lot of the same stuff the studio originally used to create the game itself.
With the mod in question, which is matter-of-factly called 'Boat Races', modder MerseyRockoff has ressurected the boat races that were originally worked on and planned out by CD Projekt during TW3's development, but unlike the horse races and bare-knuckle brawls we know and love, didn't make it into the final release.
"With the release of REDkit, 100% of the boat race script was found in the game files, which allowed for the restoration process to begin," the modder explains. "Only the text and audio files were found, the rest was created from scratch based on CDPR's writing and careful examining of the files. Which means that all the conversations, characters, notices and journal entries featured in the mod were originally written by CDPR, but re-created and brought to life by me using REDkit."
As you can see shown off in the video above, there are four races in total, with two being on the waterways around Novigrad and Oxenfurt, while the others see Gerry take on the waves of Skellige near Kaer Trolde and around the southern island of Faroe. The quests are designed to be triggered by advertisements on nearby notice boards, in a fashion you should be used to by now, following the path and all. Or, you can cut out the middleman and try to kick them off just by talking to whoever's organising/running the race in question.
While the races are quite like they would probably have been in the vanilla game for now, MerseyRockoff has future plans to give them randomised routes and allow you to repeat them once you've done your initial run, which sounds like it could turn this one-time thrill into a perfectly solid new hobby/side hustle for the White Wolf.
This is far from the only really improssive thing that's been done with REDkit so far, with one of the game's original developers having used it to offer us an alternative version of one of the Blood and Wine expansion's best quests and one modder having ported a rudimentary version of the original Witcher's Vizima into 3.