Fans remake The Witcher's prologue in The Witcher 3's engine

The first Witcher was a great game, but I returned to it recently and it's showing its age. If you want to learn more about Geralt's origins but can't take the rough edges then you're in luck, because you can now play through its prologue in The Witcher 3's engine thanks to a fan-made mod.

The trailer is above but if you don't mind story spoilers then someone has uploaded a full 50-minute play through. If you're not sure whether to download it, then watch a couple of minutes first:

Click here for installation instructions—you're going to need to remove all other mods from The Witcher 3 before you can play it.

And before you ask, no, the modders aren't planning a full remake of The Witcher in the third game's engine. From reading the discussion on the prologue mod's page it sounds like it's impossible to do with the modding tools that CD Projekt Red has provided. Making this prologue took nearly a year on its own.

If you get drawn into the story, you can buy the first game on GOG for less than $2 right now.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.