One of the great strengths of CD Projekt's RPGs Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077 is their extensive modding capabilities. This is great for players of the games, who can take advantage of new features and add-ons that the original developers never imagined, but it is also good news for budding game developers who dream of one day working in Warsaw. In a lengthy interview with Flow Gaming, CD Projekt's Pawel Sasko said that the studio gathers information extensively from the modding community when recruiting.

“Half of the quest team (for Orion, the codename for the sequel to Cyberpunk 2077) (a quest team is a team that builds quests, and there are currently 24 people) are former modders,” Sasko said. Sasko said that lead quest designer Błażej Augustynek, who started as a StarCraft modder, noted that the recently released REDkit Modding Tools for The Witcher 3 was developed by a team composed entirely of modders.

“When people ask me how young people can get into the industry, I always say, ‘Go do mods, learn how to mod,’” he said. Go start modding something.' There are a lot of toolkits and ways to do it, and the really good ones are ex-modders.”

To emphasize his point, and perhaps the fact that the big break could come at any time, Sasko related the story of an Australian Estonian beet farmer who ended up joining CD Projekt a few years ago after Sasko noticed his work related the story.

“I found a video on YouTube of someone who started remaking the prologue of The Witcher 1 in The Witcher 3 without any modding toolset. When I saw that video, I thought, 'This is amazing quality,'” Sasco said. He asked another employee, also a former modder, if he knew the person.

“He sent me his resume and we did a test. 'He was great. He did a great design test

“Then we had a conversation and he was 20 or 21 years old, I think, and he was in Australia at this time, collecting beet with a huge combine. He was doing modifications at night. So we brought him over from Australia to Poland, and he was from Estonia, and his name was Eero Valendi. He's a great guy. He's now a senior in the new Witcher game, Polaris, and he's really into The Witcher.”

It's not that unusual for game studios to have modders on staff, but CD Projekt seems to be throwing itself into the scene more enthusiastically than other studios: more than half of the current Orion Quest team are former modders, which seems like a very high percentage, The studio is also incorporating fan-made mods into the 2022 next-gen update of The Witcher 3. Above all, Sasco's message is definitely inspirational. Anything can happen, “Today we may be yo-yoing root vegetables from the dusty earth, but tomorrow.”