One of the great strengths of The Witcher 3 is its star, Big Geralt—a character we as players get to guide through the game's major events, but with a defined history and personality giving those decisions added heft. Geralt isn't a blank amnesiac Chosen One like so many RPG heroes, and I love that—it's clear the writing, acting, and quests are all built around who he is and how he can leave his mark on the world around him. That focus makes a new mod for the game called Custom Player Characters all the more impressive, because it does a pretty dang good job of turning Geralt into any other character you'd like to play as.

I saw Custom Player Characters getting some talk this week and decided to install it for myself, a process that made me suspect the folks who've written about it haven't tried it. It's a bit of a bear: I had to download the mod itself, four supplemental mods, unzip them all in the base game folder, then download a Script Merger tool to make them all play nicely together. They didn't play nicely together, giving me some kind of scripting error when I tried to launch the game; either I messed something up or an older mod that I haven't touched in years got in the way. Anyway, after an hour of deleting files, re-extracting everything and attempting to launch the game half a dozen times I finally got it going. 

Custom Player Characters works on an existing save file and is accessible from just about the very beginning of the game, as you and Vesemir are making your way to White Orchard. It pops a Chameleon potion into your inventory, and once you drink it you'll enter a character creation screen that lets you choose from the hundreds and hundreds of character models in The Witcher 3 and even mix body parts as you replace Geralt with a custom witcher. The bigger draw is playing as a “witcheress” (did we really need a gendered term for witchers?), so you can give Ciri a funny hat and custom outfit until she no longer looks like Ciri, or play as a wholly unrecognizable Viziman tweaked into your own creation. 

This customization is supported by some genuinely impressive animations tweaked for the female models and an AI-generated voice pack that reads all of Geralt's lines. There are three voice packs based on Yenn, Triss, and Ciri's voices, and from my cursory playthrough of the opening conversations in White Orchard, Ciri-as-Geralt sounds better than I expected. There's a telltale digital tinge to the voice, but it does actually come off as a higher pitch version of Geralt's growl. I don't love the use of AI to generate much of anything in games beyond higher resolution textures, but I do appreciate that modder Nikita Grebenyuk made a point of only using performances from The Witcher 3 as a basis.

“I avoid a problem with actors feeling like they were contracted to appear as a character in a game, and when the character is in something else, they feel like they may be mistaken for having supported or endorsed it, etc.” he wrote on the Nexusmods page. “So I made only voices from the witcher game, where they have already presented.”

The bit of the Custom Player Characters mod I was really eager to try was the option to ditch the witcher's way altogether and play as a sorceress, which triggers a new custom questline where you can learn a range of magic spells. These totally replace your measly witcher signs and let you throw lightning, open fast travel portals, and even polymorph into animals. The video from modder Nikita Grebenyuk above looks pretty awesome, but I had a significantly less awesome experience myself. The spells you start off with as a mage feel pretty clunky to use, with long animation windups before casting spells or using the teleport that replaces Geralt's standard dodge.

The bigger problem was that the custom quest to become a seasoned mage and unlock more spells was broken for me: I tried reloading my save multiple times, but the item I was supposed to find with my witcher vision to kick off the quest just wasn't there. If you're interested in giving it a shot, maybe wait a bit to see if further updates smooth things out.

I think it'll probably be a real stretch to cram a magic system that actually feels great to use into The Witcher 3's combat engine, but I respect the Custom Player Characters mod for trying. It doesn't integrate seamlessly into the game, but it comes closer than you might expect; if you've been absolutely dying to roleplay as a Yenn or a random peasant-turned-heroic-witcher, here's your chance.