Remember the horse races in The Witcher 3? You know, the ones you definitely didn’t fail at multiple times by getting stuck on a pole, tree, or low fence while trying to make a cheeky turn. Well, CD Projekt actually cut a few boat races in the same style from the final game, and now a modder has managed to bring them back.
How? Well, with a little lend a hand from the still relatively modern game-mod tool REDkit, which gives people access to many of the same things the studio originally used to make the game itself.
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As for the mod in question, which is commonly called “Boat races‘, modder MerseyRockoff has resurrected the boat races that CD Projekt originally worked on and planned during the development of TW3, but unlike the horse racing and bare-knuckle brawls we know and love, they 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, allowing 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 texts and a thorough examination of the files. This means that all of the conversations, characters, notifications, and journal entries included in the mod were originally written by CDPR, but recreated and brought to life by me using REDkit.”
As you can see in the video above, there are four races in total, with two taking place on the waterways around Novigrad and Oxenfurt, and the rest featuring Gerry battling the Skellige waves near Kaer Trolde and around the southern island of Faroe. The quests are designed to be triggered by advertisements on nearby noticeboards, in a way that you should be used to by now, following the path and all. Or you can cut out the middleman and try to get them out of the way by simply talking to whoever is organizing/running the race in question.
While the races are similar to those you would find in the base game, MerseyRockoff has plans to introduce random tracks and allow you to repeat them after your first run. It looks like this could turn this one-off thrill into a whole modern hobby/side hustle for White Wolf.
This is certainly not the only truly impressive thing that has been done with REDkit so far. One of the game’s original developers used it to give us an alternate version of one of the best quests from the Blood and Wine expansion, and a modder ported a stripped-down version of the original Witcher Vizima to version 3.
