The Witcher 4's development team includes an ex-beetroot farmer who brought The Witcher 1's prologue to Wild Hunt
He's not the only one either, Cyberpunk 2077's sequel is also being worked on by a lot of folks who got their start via modding.
How do you end up working on The Witcher 4? Well, it turns out one member of the team ended up there due to some modding work they were doing in the free time they had around being a beetroot farmer. They're certainly not the only CD Projekt dev who got their industry start that way, either
Pawel Sasko, who's currently the associate game director on Cyberpunk 2077's sequel, discussed how important bringing on board former modders has been for the developer in a recent interview with Flow Games.
One particular case he highlighted was that of Witcher 4 senior quest designer Eero Varendi, who was orignally brought on board by CD Projekt after the company spotted one of the mods he'd made while off-duty from growing veggies.
"There was a video on YouTube that appeard, about a guy who, without complelely without [the official] modding toolset, started remaking The Witcher 1's prologue in The Witcher 3," Sasko recalled, "I saw the video and I was like, 'damn this is such high quality work, so I asked [CD Projekt narrative director Philipp Weber], who is a modder, 'do you know this guy in the community?' and he said, 'yeah, yeah I know who he is'. [I said] 'message him and tell him to send us his CV.' He sent me the CV and we did the test, the test was wonderful. He was great. He did [a] great design test."
Sasko went on to say that this led to conversations about bringing Varendi, an Estonian who was in his early twenties and working on a beetroot farm in Australia at the time, on board. "He was collecting beetroot with a huge combine, like those huge harvesters that are driving and collecting. That's what he was doing, and he was modding in the evenings, basically," the developer added, "He's a senior right now on Polaris, the new Witcher game. He's obsessed about [The] Witcher.
The mod being alluded to here is almost certainly 'Witcher 1 Prologue Remastered', uploaded in November 2017 by Estonian modder Erxv, since it also matches Sasko citing this chain of events as having taken place "seven or eight years ago".
Outside of Varendi, Sasko also revealed that "half of the [24-ish person strong] quest team" working on Cyberpunk 2077's sequel are former modders, adding that he'd reccomend taking up modding to anyone looking to get into the games industry. "Start from modding something," he said, "There are so many toolkits, so many ways to do it. Honestly, [some] of the best people that we have are former modders."
So, get modding, even if you're almost defintely a bit too late to land a gig on The Witcher 4, especially since CD Projekt recently said that game's "the most advanced" of its current projects.