Spoiler Warning: This article contains some spoilers for the ending of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt alongside a handful of minor spoilers from The Witcher book series.
A Witcher 3 modder has discovered and restored a huge chunk of gameplay cut from the beloved role-playing game's ending by developer CD Projekt.
This extended ending, outlined by YouTuber xLetalis and modded by glassfish777, begins after protagonist Geralt's fight with Witcher 3's main antagonist, Eredin of The Wild Hunt. Geralt is pulled away from this fight after his victory by potential partner and powerful sorceress Yennefer of Vengerberg in the actual game, but in the cut content instead wakes up in a tent, being seen to by two doctors.
A restored cutscene here shows the pair making a bet over whether or not Geralt lives, and the witcher wakes up with his own snappy response: "I'll take that bet." He eventually leaves the tent and encounters Yennefer in a scene with varying dialogue depending on if players entered a relationship with her or fellow sorceress Triss Merigold.
Geralt can ask who won the war here, and Yennefer responds by explaining the Skelligans fled the war after the death of Crach an Craite, whose death during the battle wasn't mentioned again in the full game.
Subsequent scenes show just how much CD Projekt scrapped here, as entire groups of miscellaneous background characters are fitted with their own dialogue. Some are veterans of Cintra, for example, a story from the book series and Nilfgaard's first venture north, while others have unique dialogue about murdering someone.
Geralt then attends Crach's funeral, meeting Triss on the way. This too has varying paths depending on who became the new king or queen of Skellige. Further interactions show a conversation between Yennefer and Triss and Geralt meeting The Lodge of Sorceresses.
It's this final point which has the most dramatic story change to the main game and general Witcher lore, however. The Lodge is essentially a secret society of powerful sorceresses who seek to control the myriad countries of The Continent from behind the scenes, only featured briefly in Witcher 3 as Geralt reunites them to help fight The Wild Hunt. After the battle, however, it's not mentioned again. But Yennefer betrays The Lodge in this version.
She does have a complex relationship with its members, told throughout myriad books and games, but Yennefer's decision comes as part of a deal to save Ciri, as she essentially sells them off to Nilfgaardian emperor Emhyr var Emreis, who seemingly plans to kill them.
Geralt can respond in three different ways, which again unfold to grander repercussions, but he doesn't appear to be particularly happy with Yennefer regardless of the option chosen. Witcher fans will likely long debate whether or not this should have happened in the game, and why it was removed in the first place.
This sequence took place immediately after what's essentially the final boss fight though, and preceding another intense scene where Geralt and Yennefer rush across an island as monsters emerge from portals all around them, so it was perhaps just cut for the sake of pacing.
This deleted content is the first major discovery following the release of REDkit: an official modding tool for Witcher 3 released by CD Projekt in May 2024. The developer announced REDkit in November 2023, saying "it will allow you to create your own experiences in the game by making something completely new or editing existing quests and content."
It didn't say anything about fans digging up its own scrapped content, however, and more does exist. CD Projekt has previously commented on cut missions related to Iorveth from The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, for example, so perhaps fans will revive that and other sequences too.
REDkit has otherwise been used to create some wild and wacky mods for Witcher 3, including one that lets Geralt ride an enormous fiend instead of Roach and another that recreates the original game in Witcher 3's engine ahead of an official remake.
Mods will be the only new content coming to Witcher 3 going forward, of course, as while the game received a PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S update in December 2022, it otherwise won't get any more official content as CD Projekt focuses on its wealth of other incoming projects.
The highly anticipated next mainline Witcher game, codenamed Polaris, is currently in development but won't arrive until 2025 at the absolute earliest, and probably later. There are two other Witcher games on the horizon too, including the aforementioned remake of the original Witcher and a multiplayer spin-off.
Image Credit: xLetalis and glassfish777 on YouTube
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He'll talk about The Witcher all day.
