CD Projekt isn't quite finished with The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt just yet. The studio announced today that it's got "one more patch" in the works for Geralt's big adventure that will add cross-platform mod support across PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S through mod.io.

"Creating, sharing, and enjoying mods will be easier and more accessible, as players on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S will be able to share a modding ecosystem," CD Projekt said in the announcement.

There will be some limitations to mod support on consoles. A mod.io account, connected to a CD Projekt Red account, will be required to access cross-platform mod support, and not every mod will be available on all platforms.

"Due to specific content guidelines and selection criteria for each platform, it may not be possible to bring every mod uploaded on PC to console," CD Projekt explained in an FAQ. "Mods available on mod.io must also adhere to our Fan Content Guidelines and CD Projekt Red User Agreement."

(So probably not Vaginas for Everyone, I'm guessing.)

Witcher 3 fans will also not be able to actually create mods on consoles—that will remain the exclusive purview of PC. Using CD Projekt's Redkit modding tools will not be mandatory for making cross-platform mods, but is recommended.

This is a pretty big deal. Mods can extend a game's lifespan far beyond what it would normally be, and that's as true for The Witcher 3 as it is for any game. (It also bears remembering that The Witcher 3 only got full-on mod support with the release of Redkit last year—prior to that, modders had to make do with the much more limited Modkit.) Expanding the selection of the good stuff to consoles gives potentially a lot of players an excuse to pop back in, and the reaction has been suitably upbeat.

CD Projekt has its hands full with The Witcher 4 and Cyberpunk 2 these days, so why is The Witcher 3 still getting this kind of attention? I'm not privy to CD Projekt's executive decision-making processes but I do know that money tends to be a powerful motivator as a general sort of thing, and Witcher 3 is still pulling it in: In its most recent financial report, the studio said The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt has now sold 60 million copies across its standard and GOTY editions.

The Witcher 3 hit 50 million copies sold in May 2023, meaning it's moved another 10 million copies in two years, a number that would be enviable for just about any game, let alone one that's been around since 2015—and a pretty good reason to keep the support coming.

The Byzantine emperor Basil II had an illustrious career. He ruled for almost 50 years, stood fast during a time of perpetual civil war, subjugated the First Bulgarian Empire and won a large number of military campaigns. And thanks to Dr. Andrew Alan Johnson, he briefly conquered history, replacing every single entry in Civilization 6's meaty Civilopedia.

Johnson is an associate professor at Stockholm University and a historical consultant. He's worked with Firaxis since Civilization 6—specifically the New Frontier Pass, which introduced Byzantium, along with Basil II.

"So I come to Firaxis, and they tell me, 'OK, so first couple of days, just play the game; get really familiar with the game.' And that wasn't hard, because I was a fan long before I was an employee there," Johnson tells me. "And then let's write some entries."

Johnson has been responsible for everything from achievement names to helping the art team get the outfits for historical leaders just right, but he also wrote a lot of entries for Civ's mammoth compendium of knowledge—the aforementioned Civilopedia.

"I think they were entries for people like Bà Triệu, for Basil, the New Frontiers Pass civilisations, leaders and wonders," he recalls. "And then here we upload it onto the database. And I just uploaded it over every other file. The entire folder just went, and I looked, and it was just my one little entry on Basil II. That's it. That's the Civilopedia. Archer? Basil. Egypt? Basil."

After turning the Civilopedia into a monument to Basil II's achievements, he thought his time at Firaxis had come to an end. "It was a good week that I had in game dev. I'm going to go and, I don't know, maybe be a nomad or something like that, raise sheep in Montana."

Luckily, being a shepherd was not on the cards. "There are measures that a company like Firaxis has to prevent this, so going to IT, saying my mea culpa, they were able to rescue it [by] rolling it back to the previous version. But that was my first real experience getting into game design."

While it might have felt like a harrowing trial by fire at the time, the experience emphasises how different it is to work on a team project when compared to Johnson's other life, in academia, where everything falls on his own shoulders.

"Especially in my field, in anthropology, I am the data collection tool," he says. "I'm the person who writes the thing. And when I send something out, it is all me that is in there. And so if I screw something up conceptually, or if I lose my field notes—there's stories of anthropologists who have lost all their field notes in some disaster, and a friend of mine had all his field notes taken by the police—if you lose something like that, that's on you. You have to rewrite the entire thing."

Clearly Firaxis was prepared for these kinds of mistakes, and the studio continued to work with Johnson, who also wrote the Civilization 7 Civilopedia among other things. Chatting to him, it's just really fascinating to hear how he approached it, echoing what he told us earlier in the year, where he said he wanted Civ 7 to be a "gateway drug" into history.

The Civilopedia is a platform where Johnson can educate, can share his passion for history and anthropology, and use his expertise to enlighten gamers. "I don't need to explain what archery is, so this gives me the opportunity to take a page, or take a few paragraphs and tell the story and talk about how, actually, archery radically predates anything in Civ.

"You can make bows out of horn. You can make bows out of wood. You've gotta think about tensile strength. You've gotta think about power versus mobility. So a longbow is good because of the grain of the wood and a particular kind of a tree. You can get better power in a smaller space if you mix materials and glue things together with bone and wood and then use that on top of a horse. But if you go to a warm, wet climate, as the Mongols found out, all those bows are going to break."

So Johnson was able to tell you all about technology that "you think you know already" and then reveal how "accidents, unexpected consequences or unseen factors, like material, play into the way history plays out".

While I went into our conversation looking to hear more about how Johnson deleted the Civilopedia, we ended up having a wide-ranging chat about AI, history, academia and how it intersects with game development, so keep an eye out for more articles from this interview over the next few days.