The Witcher 3 remains one of the most modded and most beloved games on our site and we certainly see no sign of that stopping anytime soon. That's especially true when we have incredible mod authors such as nikich340, who we're thrilled to be speaking with today, keeping the scene fresh and thriving. In this interview, we'll be talking about the incredible Custom Player Characters mod, that gives you the ability to play through the legendary game as any of the Witchers, Witcheress', Sorceress' or NPCs in the game with fully customisable appearance options - insane!
Thanks for chatting with us today, to start things off, why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself?
I am Nikita from Russia (Far East region), I am currently 24 years old, and have recently finished my 6-year education as a medic at a local university. I am now planning to continue study (which will be combined with actually working as a doctor) in residency in ophthalmology. In my free time, I mostly mod the Witcher 3!
What got you into gaming in the first place, and what are you playing at the moment?The first time I played a video game was when I was 8 years old. My father bought me a CD Disk in Moscow, and it was a funny and interesting game called "Pilot Brothers" (you probably have never heard of it, as it's based on an old Russian cartoon). Then I played several other games, including FlatOut 2, NFS: Most Wanted (2005), Quake III. At the moment I am playing around with modding tools for the Witcher 3. The last real games I played were: Elden Ring (still planning to start DLC), Cyberpunk 2077 + DLC and Horizon Forbidden West.
So, what led you to becoming a mod author yourself, particularly for The Witcher 3?
The first time I saw The Witcher 3’s gameplay on my roommate's PC it impressed me so much that I started playing the saga from the first Witcher game, then the Witcher 2 and finally the Witcher 3 with both DLCs. When I finished I noticed that there were custom tools for adding new content to the Witcher 3, called radish modding tools, but it was said that they are quite hard and require passing so-called "trials" to understand them fully. It sounded very intriguing, as I had some coding knowledge and was eager to add new story quests. It appeared that if you are ready to learn, you can do nearly anything even with these unofficial tools (later I learned how the whole game works in general and started using WolvenKit - another unofficial tool, and even made several noticeable improvements to it). My first project was a new quest called A Night to Remember, which continues an unfinished story about the vampiress Orianna from the Blood and Wine expansion.
You’ve recently released the Custom Player Characters mod, what led to you wanting to do this for the Witcher 3 specifically?The idea about making Sorceress combat gameplay came into my mind soon after releasing " A Night to Remember". I think Sorceresses and their chaos power are very attractive. The implementation was another level of modding - delving into player scripts, animations, scene systems etc. to make nearly everything to be as I want and to make playing as a sorceress as immersive as possible. There were a LOT of bugs and pitfalls, which took me most of the time spent on the mod to solve them.
Most importantly, do you have a favourite NPC appearance that you can play as with your mod?
As you know, the mod adds all the available NPC appearances to the special selection scene, where you can preview any appearance before applying it on your player. I think that Philippa is my favourite character, despite her being a cold and calculating woman, maybe because she is very experienced and powerful as a Sorceress.
You’re known for your work modding The Witcher 3, have you considered modding for any other games?
Aside from The Witcher 3, there were a couple of projects I made for Crysis years ago.
It might be too soon to ask, but is there anything you’re working on next that you can tease for us?
Currently I am working on slightly updating CPC mod, adding new female voices as new voice actors contact me, and developing some tools like DB strings editor for the Redkit (I love Redkit and what it’s capable of, but in some parts, like managing strings, I would like to have full control what Redkit offers). I would also like to continue Master Ainyerahn's story line, I have some ideas already but nothing to tease yet.
As you may know, originally part of the mod (Female Voices for Geralt) used the voices of the Witcher 3 original characters, so that when playing as a female character, Geralt's voice would change to a female voice for better immersion. I made female AI speech for all 7 voice languages available in the game: English, German, Portuguese, French, Polish, Russian and Japanese.
I asked users if they are willing to provide their voice to create new voiceovers. I got replies pretty quickly from several women who were willing to help me out. I want to say a huge thank you to these people, as thanks to them the mod remains fully functional and already has custom voices in English, German, French and Russian. Here is a link to a playlist with demos of those voices.
However, there are still missing voices for Japanese, Portuguese (Brazilian) and Polish, so if any female readers are willing to help me with this, please email me or message me on Discord at nikich340.
Well, that's my weekend plans sorted: Making the most cursed characters I can and riding round Toussaint! A huge thank you again to Nikita for joining us.
If you're planning on giving Custom Player Characters a go, we'd love to see your creations in the comments and, as always, if there are any other games or mod authors you'd like to see showcased, send SlugGirl a message.
