This Witcher 3 mod that lets you play as a custom character or a whole new sorceress class is super promising, but maybe wait a few months for it to iron out the kinks

GamesRPGThe Witcher 3: Wild HuntThis Witcher 3 mod that lets you play as a custom character or a whole new sorceress class is super promising, but maybe wait a few months for it to iron out the kinksWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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The Witcher 3 “Custom Player Characters” Mod - YouTubeWatch On

The Witcher 3 “Custom Player Characters” Mod - YouTube

The Witcher 3

One of the great strengths of The Witcher 3 is its star, Big Geralt—a character we as players get to guide through the game’s major events, but with a defined history and personality giving those decisions added heft. Geralt isn’t a blank amnesiac Chosen One like so many RPG heroes, and I love that—it’s clear the writing, acting, and quests are all built around who he is and how he can leave his mark on the world around him. That focus makes a new mod for the game called Custom Player Characters all the more impressive, because it does a pretty dang good job of turning Geralt into any other character you’d like to play as.

More from the Witcher world(Image credit: CD PRojekt RED)The Witcher 4: What we knowThe Witcher season 3: Trailers and castWitcher 3 mods: Good huntingThe Witcher books: Where to start

More from the Witcher world

(Image credit: CD PRojekt RED)The Witcher 4: What we knowThe Witcher season 3: Trailers and castWitcher 3 mods: Good huntingThe Witcher books: Where to start

(Image credit: CD PRojekt RED)

The Witcher 3 - Geralt artwork

The Witcher 4: What we knowThe Witcher season 3: Trailers and castWitcher 3 mods: Good huntingThe Witcher books: Where to start

I saw Custom Player Characters getting some talk this week and decided to install it for myself, a process that made me suspect the folks who’ve written about it haven’t tried it. It’s a bit of a bear: I had to download the mod itself, four supplemental mods, unzip them all in the base game folder, then download a Script Merger tool to make them all play nicely together. Theydidn’tplay nicely together, giving me some kind of scripting error when I tried to launch the game; either I messed something up or an older mod that I haven’t touched in years got in the way. Anyway, after an hour of deleting files, re-extracting everything and attempting to launch the game half a dozen times I finally got it going.

Custom Player Characters works on an existing save file and is accessible from just about the very beginning of the game, as you and Vesemir are making your way to White Orchard. It pops a Chameleon potion into your inventory, and once you drink it you’ll enter a character creation screen that lets you choose from the hundreds and hundreds of character models in The Witcher 3 and even mix body parts as you replace Geralt with a custom witcher. The bigger draw is playing as a “witcheress” (did we really need a gendered term for witchers?), so you can give Ciri a funny hat and custom outfit until she no longer looks like Ciri, or play as a wholly unrecognizable Viziman tweaked into your own creation.

“I avoid a problem with actors feeling like they were contracted to appear as a character in a game, and when the character is in something else, they feel like they may be mistaken for having supported or endorsed it, etc.” he wroteon the Nexusmods page. “So I made only voices from the witcher game, where they have already presented.”

The bit of the Custom Player Characters mod I was really eager to try was the option to ditch the witcher’s way altogether and play as a sorceress, which triggers a new custom questline where you can learn a range of magic spells. These totally replace your measly witcher signs and let you throw lightning, open fast travel portals, and even polymorph into animals. The video from modder Nikita Grebenyuk above looks pretty awesome, but I had a significantly less awesome experience myself. The spells you start off with as a mage feel pretty clunky to use, with long animation windups before casting spells or using the teleport that replaces Geralt’s standard dodge.

Image1of5(Image credit: CD Projekt Red, Nikita Grebenyuk)(Image credit: CD Projekt Red, Nikita Grebenyuk)(Image credit: CD Projekt Red, Nikita Grebenyuk)(Image credit: CD Projekt Red, Nikita Grebenyuk)(Image credit: CD Projekt Red, Nikita Grebenyuk)

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(Image credit: CD Projekt Red, Nikita Grebenyuk)(Image credit: CD Projekt Red, Nikita Grebenyuk)(Image credit: CD Projekt Red, Nikita Grebenyuk)(Image credit: CD Projekt Red, Nikita Grebenyuk)(Image credit: CD Projekt Red, Nikita Grebenyuk)

(Image credit: CD Projekt Red, Nikita Grebenyuk)