Another Witcher 3 mod adds cut content back into the RPG, and this time it’s boat races that have been lurking in the game files for nearly 10 years

A Witcher 3 modder has restored boat races that CD Projekt originally cut from the game nearly a decade ago.

CD Projekt recently launched REDkit, a dev-made modding tool designed to let the Witcher 3’s community design their own quests, items, and even character animations from scratch. As noted by VG247, one modder instead utilized the REDkit to restore content that was cut from The Witcher 3 before launch by CD Projekt itself.

The content would ‘Boat Races,’ as the mod is suitably dubbed over on NexusMods. The mod’s description reads that boat races were “planned during the development of the game, but cut from the final version,” and you can see several boat races play out, as recreated by the modding team itself, in the 26-minute video just below.

“With the release of REDkit, 100% of the boat race script was found in the game files, which allowed for the restoration process to begin. Only the text and audio files were found, the rest was created from scratch based on CDPR’s writing and careful examining of the files,” the mod’s description adds. It’s incredible that the modding team was able to create all this from just text and audio files.

There are currently four boat races in The Witcher 3 thanks to this mod, taking place in and around Oxenfurt, Novigrad Harbor, Kaer Trolde, and Faroe. These are routes set in stone, but the modding team plans on adding randomized routes for the four locations at some point in the future, as well as making the races repeatable, and adding other audio languages besides English.

That’s a massive undertaking, especially for adding all-new voice lines in other languages. Subtitles for the mod are available in 17 languages, including English, Chinese, and Turkish, which is similarly really impressive for a modding team to put together from text files left over from CD Projekt’s development phase, many of which might well be unfinished.

This isn’t the first time cut content has been uncovered via CD Projekt’s own modding tools. Last month, a modder discovered The Witcher 3 originally had an extended ending for Yennefer and The Lodge, the cabal of witches, that featured the former basically betraying a number of them and letting said witches be captured and imprisoned by Nilfgaard. 

Take a look over our best RPGs guide if you’re after something similarly massive to The Witcher 3 to delve into right now.