I am spending an excessive amount of time roaming around the world of Witcher 3. Last night I finally wrapped up most of the loose ends in the Velen/Novigrad areas and made my way over to the Isle of Skellige. I specifically love this sequence of the game, so often times I try and wrap everything up so that when I get there I can feel like I can really explore it freely. Writing blog posts when I am actively playing a story driven game… that features a large number of spoilers for anyone who has NOT played it… always lands in this really weird place for me. I don’t want to accidentally ruin an experience for someone that might follow in my footsteps and become interested in the game. However at the same time there is only so much time that I can spend talking about things in only the most general of terms.
Instead this morning I thought I would talk about some of the care and feeding of this current Witcher 3 play through. If you have read this blog for any length of time you will know that I greatly favor the PC as a platform, and one of the main reasons behind this apart from my love of keyboard and mouse controls is the fact that I can easily modify the game to behave the way I want it to. If there is something that annoys me with a console game, I basically have to make a decision if I am going to suck it up and deal with it… or just quit playing the game. On the PC however we have another option… to fix whatever behavior I personally find offending and then move on with the modified and more enjoyable experience. Along with most of the internet… I use NexusMods as my core source for all my modding needs and maintain a subscription to it just to speed up data transfers.
I am going to take a little bit and talk about the mods that I am running on this particular play through of the game.
Over 9000 – Weight Limit Mod
One of the things that I hate almost more than anything in a big open world like this is being limited in my ability to loot and scoot. I hate inventory management. It is legitimately the bane of my existence in games, and when I can either install a mod or run a console command and never have to worry with it ever again… I am always going to take that option. Thankfully the mod scene has made this extremely painless and given me a mod that takes my item weight limit from around 100 to 9999. This allows me to run around for days without caring about managing items while still looting until my heart is content.
Autoloot – Autoloot the Items You Want
Going hand in hand with this is a mod that just automagically loots everything when you kill anything or interact with a container. It converts the notifications to a little toast window in the lower lefthand corner of the screen giving you a quick notification of everything that was just sucked into your inventory. The specific variant that I am running is the file set that will keep you from accidentally stealing anything. I am contemplating swapping over to the Herbs and Corpses variant however which apparently auto picks up any herbs that you run past that are in your loot radius. If a corpse has an item on it needed for quest progress, you still have to manually loot it.
Fast Travel from Anywhere
The map in Witcher 3 is massive, and this one is largely a quality of life change to make navigating around a bit easier. By default you have to make your way back to a signpost marked in green on your map, which will then allow you to teleport to any other signpost you have already unlocked. This mod is pretty straight forward and cuts out the travel time allowing you to just crack open the map and teleport directly. This is phenomenal for when you have fought your way down into an area and are nowhere near civilization and just want to pop back to town to do something quickly. Essentially it makes Witcher work more like other games with fast travel points.
Lamp on Player’s Boat
The older I get the harder time I have with nighttime and picking out details… and this carries forward with video games as well. In general if I am running around at night in Witcher 3, I have my torch out but there are a number of actions that keep you from using your torch. One of these for example is piloting a boat and this mod simply adds a torch to every boat in the game giving you some illumination. It also makes it way easier to spot the boats in the world scattered along the coastline. Like most of the mods I am using it is the little quality of life things that I tend to tweak.
Cheap Dyes Everywhere and Dye-able Starting Armor
One of the cool features that was added into the game with the Blood and Wine expansion, is the ability to dye certain armor sets. This is a feature that I did not even know existed until I went searching for a mod to change the look of my favorite armor set. I love the Ursine Witcher armor, but I am not a big fan of the cream/green/red look that it comes with by default. What I wanted was the ability to dye my armor black like a proper Witcher armor should be. Now you cannot even start the Blood and Wine expansion before level 35, and the dyes don’t show up on vendors until then… but this mod changes that and makes a large number of vendors around the early parts of the game sell armor dyes and for cheap. Now I have my Ursine armor in darker shades and am significantly happier with life.
That is it folks. Those are all of the mods that I happen to be running at this moment. There is one that I have been eyeing that changes the scabbards for the swords to black but I have not messed with installing it because often times you have to deal with mod conflicts. For example there is an addon that I would love to use that marks every quest that you have in your journal on your map, so that you can know if there are other quests in the near vicinity that you can complete at the same time. However it conflicts with the Fast Travel mod, and I have not wanted to mess with figuring out how to manually merge the two. For me a lot of the mods that I end up using remove friction that I do not personally find meaningful. Modding is ultimately just that a very personal choice, and while I would not say anything that I am doing is “required” to enjoy the game it absolutely improves my enjoyment.