Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher 3 are alive today because of mods. CD Projekt Red's single-player RPGs stick around because modders continue to reinvent how we play them long after we've finished with the vanilla experience, and CDPR knows it. The team is so impressed with modders that some often make their way into official development, and the Cyberpunk 2077 sequel is no different. In fact, half of the game's quest team is made up of former modders, with many more dotted across the studio.
That's according to Paweł Sasko, the quest director on RPGs have prolific modding scenes, and the developer is no stranger to crediting the work of modders and ing them wherever possible.
"Half of the quest team [on the next Cyberpunk] – this is the team that builds the quests which is at 24 people right now – are former modders," Sasko says in a Flow Games interview. "[They come] from Witcher, Cyberpunk, and other games. Błażej Augustynek, who's a quest director now, was a modder of StarCraft 1 and 2.
"We also have modders in other departments. There's a small team called Jigsoft that's composed only of modders. It's around 20 of them and they're working with us," Sasko adds. Jigsoft was responsible for shipping The Witcher 3's modding tool earlier this year, letting anyone make quests, NPCs, and whatever they can imagine using one set of instruments.
"I always advise young people when they ask how to get into the industry, 'go and learn how to mod," Sasko says. "There are so many toolkits, so many ways to do it, and some of the best people we have are former modders." Sasko even says that CDPR hired a modder who was remaking the Witcher 1 prologue inside of Witcher 3.
CD Projekt Red has always had an incredible relationship with modders. When The Witcher 3's next-gen port came out, CDPR integrated the work of popular mods and even reimbursed and credited the creators for their efforts. Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher 3 are also some of the most popular games on the Nexus Mods hosting platform, with well over 500 million s between them. Before Cyberpunk 2077's successful relaunch with the Phantom Liberty expansion, mods were absolutely the reason that the community stayed alive, and now it's bigger than ever.
CDPR's Night City has come a long way, and it's been incredibly well deserved. Back at launch, we said in our Cyberpunk 2077 review that the game doesn't sur its influences, but with Phantom Liberty, that's no longer the case.
With the Cyberpunk 2077 sequel years away at this point, you can keep busy with some of the best cyberpunk games currently available on PC.
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