Today, September 29th, the community behind the WAR Project—the ambitious fan effort to restore a plague-themed questline that CD Projekt Red abandoned before the original release of The Witcher 3—confirmed that its mod has been left non-functional by the game’s newly launched Remastered edition. In an announcement posted to the mod’s Discord server late yesterday, lead developer Ferroxius explained that the staggering number of changes baked into the remaster means the mod will not run out of the box, but promised that a follow-up update would not only repair the situation but add “something extra” to the experience.
The Witcher 3 The Witcher 3 is back on the path in Remastered form, and with that remaster came a host of tweaks to the decade-old role-playing game. As with any long-established modding scene, an adjustment period was always inevitable for the RPG’s established creations. The one that will not work straight out of the package is the WAR Project, an ongoing effort to restore a plague-themed questline that CD Projekt Red shelved prior to the game’s original 2015 launch.
A Temporary Bump on the Trail
While the news that the mod is currently broken could have spooked eager players, the modders behind it were quick to frame the disruption as a temporary setback rather than a permanent setback. According to Ferroxius, the team has been working closely with both CD Projekt Red and its partner studio Yigsoft throughout the remaster’s development, giving them a head start on reconciling the mod with the updated codebase.
“As Witcher 3 Remastered draws close, we wanted to clarify on the state of the mod,” Ferroxius wrote. “Unfortunately due to the (quite frankly) insane amount of changes made to the game, the mod will not work out of the box on Remastered. We do know this with certainty as we can now reveal in proper that all of us have been in direct contact with CDPR and Yigsoft over several months, helping test Remastered and the mod.io integration before release.”
The developer added that the team has used the intervening time to familiarize itself with the game’s additions and improvements, expressing confidence that a fix would not take long to deliver. “We will endeavour to get WAR working and updated for Remastered as soon as possible,” Ferroxius said. “In addition to the obvious benefits of now being able to play WAR on an improved baseline with Remaster, we’ll also be throwing in something extra with that update while we continue to work on the next phase of content.”
Voice Acting and a Phased Rollout
From the sounds of it, that “something extra” is likely to be English voice acting. The modders had originally planned to push a somewhat smaller update live midway through this month, but the timing has now been aligned with the remaster’s launch. MerseyRockoff, another key member of the WAR Project team, laid out the roadmap in a September 21st reply in the mod’s Nexus comments.
“We will aim for [the] phase 1 update within a week of the Remaster launch, which will include the quests that were already there, plus a lot of fixes, plus English VAs for phase 1,” MerseyRockoff wrote. “Then roughly in [the] two months afterwards, we aim to release phase 2 which will include four new quests, two remade quests, and two mini quests.” The modder also made clear that, once updated to Remastered spec, the mod will be available exclusively for that version of the game going forward.
Building Toward a 2027 Release
As of writing, four of the 12 planned quests are playable in the demo version of the WAR Project that the modders released back in June, with a further four listed as being in active development. The project has not been without its challenges, however. Last month, the team had to recast the actor they had originally selected to provide new lines for Vernon Roche, a decision they attributed to what they described as a “severe incident of gross misconduct.”
Looking Ahead
With the phase 1 update expected within a week of the Remaster’s launch, the immediate priority for the WAR Project team is stabilizing the mod against the remaster’s heavily modified code. The phase 2 content, which will bring four new quests, two remade quests, and two mini quests, is slated for roughly two months after that. Until then, the community’s patience will be tested, but the developers’ close collaboration with CD Projekt Red and Yigsoft, combined with their phased plan, points toward a smooth transition once the update lands.
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