In a wide-ranging interview with Flow Gaming, CD Projekt’s Associate Game Director Pawel Sasko shared a fantastic anecdote.
We’ve already written about The Witcher 4, that it’s the game that has the most people working on it at CD Projekt, and that it’s the most in development. The strength of the Polish company’s games is that they are highly moddable thanks to the REDengine toolkit. And there have been examples of a dream come true, where a modder has done such an excellent job that he’s been officially hired by the Poles!
“Half of the quest team [on Orion, the codename for the sequel to Cyberpunk 2077] – the quest team is the team that builds the quests, it’s about 24 people right now – half of them are former modders. I always tell young people when they ask me how to get into the industry, I say, ‘Go mod. Just go and learn how to mod. Start by modding something. There’s so many toolkits, so many ways to do it, and really, [some] of the best people we have are former modders. Sasko said. He’s right: Błażej Augustynek (Lead Quest Designer) started out as a StarCraft modder…
But you can go even further. The Estonian beet farmer, who used to live in Australia, joined CD Projekt a few years ago after Sasko discovered his work: “There was a video on YouTube about a guy who, with no modding toolset whatsoever, started remaking the Witcher 1 prologue into Witcher 3. I watched the video and thought, ‘Damn, this is such high-quality work,'” says Sasko, who asked a colleague, another exmodder, if he knew the man. Lucky for him, he did, and the studio contacted the person to submit his resume.
“He sent me the resume and we did the test, the test was wonderful. He was great. He did a great design test. Then we had conversations, and he was, I think, 20 or 21, and he was in Australia at the time, and he was picking beets with a huge combine, like those huge harvesters that go around and pick. That’s what he was doing, and he was modding in the evenings. So I brought him from Australia to Poland and he’s from Estonia and his name is Eero Varendi. Amazing guy. He’s a senior on Polaris, the new Witcher game, he’s obsessed with Witcher,” Sasko added.
What a great story!
Source: PCGamer
