"I made it in 2014, took you a while", Witcher 3 dev reveals he was behind hilarious bit of cut Geralt dialogue you only get if you grab a mod, then suffer an embarrassing death
To be fair, those fierce bits of taxidermy have gotten the best of me more times than I'd care to admit.
I don't know about you, but I've spent a lot of time playing The Witcher 3 over the years, to the point where you start to feel like you just about know a game inside out. I clearly don't quite though, as one of the game's developers has just revealed he was behind a bit of cut Geralt dialogue I've never run into, mainly because you need a certain mod enabled during a specific scene to do so.
Yep, leave it to modders to cheekily ressurect something CDPR had created, but eventually decided not to include in the final version of the game for whatever reason, like those boat races, and give us all a chance to see how it'd have transformed our adventure if it had made it in. In this case, that last part is just a good laugh.
As highlighted by YouTuber xLetalis in their latest video, one of the bits of cut content that the huge 'Brothers in Arms' mod for the game restores is an alternate outcome for a bit in the quest that sees Geralt and Yen attend the feast at Kaer Trolde just after arriving in Skellige.
If you jog your memory, you'll remember that this quest involves breaking into the quarters of Ermion, the isles' most druidy druid, and one of the traps in your way is a room that fills with hallucinogen and causes Geralt to have to fight some stuffed bears. In the base game, you their murder death them all successfully, or you suffer the usual game over screen if they do the same to you, but the mod adds back in a pretty funny third option if you've got it installed.
Basically, instead of actually dying if his health gets halfway depleted, a cutscene plays that sees a prone Geralt tell Yen he can't get up, adding "I'm dead, they killed me" in his usual wonderfully deadpan tone, before she gets him back on track and the cutscene continues as normal. While xLetalis speculated as to why CD Projekt might have taken this out, the good news is that we now at least know who put it in to start with.
"Oh, glad to see it was found," developer Paweł Sasko, who's currently working on Cyberpunk 2077's sequel as an associate game director, tweeted in response to the video, "I made it in 2014, took you a while." That looks like it was it in terms of details, though, so it seems as though Sasko maybe likes the idea of folks just not knowing why this silly little gag ended up not making it in Gerry from the River's 60+ hour stand-up tour.
If you like Witcher 3 mods, make sure to check out our coverage of a bunch of cool quests and other stuff folks have recently made for CD Projekt's REDkitmodding contests.