Witcher 3 mod lets you explore the first Witcher game's Vizima, less than a day after REDkit made it possible

Ok, so it's been less than 24 hours since CD Projekt let folks get their hands on The Witcher 3's new REDkit modding tools. Naturally, someone's already had a go at porting the bunch of areas that make up the city of Vizima in The first Witcher game into 3.

If you're out of the loop, REDKIT is designed to give folks modding CDPR's masterpiece more power than ever before, with access to a lot of the same tools the studio orginally used to create the game itself. That includes the ability to do stuff like create new quests, or as is key in this case, add in entire new territories.

So, the latter's exactly what modder AngryCatster's tried with some of the maps from the first Witcher game, porting them across into TW3 just to see how things look. While they admit that this is "fairly low-effort attempt" at bringing these areas to the newer game, what they've ended up with is essentially an empty version of Vizima that Geralt can explore.

The four areas that've been ported are Vizima's temple quarter, trade quarter, old Vizima, and the dyke that connects the two, with all of the loading screens you'd encounter while moving between these districts in the first game not being there - allowing for a much more seamless tour of the NPC-less Temerian capital.

Though, as AngryCatster outlines in the mod's description, there'd have to be a lot of work put in to make the area look and work like the vanilla game's locations, with lots of geometry and textures not fuctioning properly at the moment, in addition to the fact "it is very easy to fall out of bounds because original game didn't have much vertical mobility".

So, what does this mean for the possiblity of other iconic maps or locations from the series being brought across to The Witcher 3 and developed into a fully fuctional state? Well, sadly it sounds like that'll still take a gargantuan effort to pull off.

"REDkit 2 has an option to export the entire level geometry into the common format that can then be imported into TW3," AngryCatster has replied to one commenter asking whether they be able to port regions from The Witcher 2 over, "However, materials don't get exported and adding them back manually would be immensely tedious and time consuming. Loading worlds or any TW2 asset into REDkit 3 throws an error about asset version being too low or something like that. I suppose file formats between the games changed too drastically to be backwards compatible."

This modder isn't the only one who's been creating cool stuff to test out The Witcher 3's new modding tools, with one of the game's original developers having used them to offer us an alternative version of one of the Blood and Wine expansion's best quests.