The Witcher 3 modders are rebuilding the cut plague questline, and a demo is already out

Modder MerseyRockoff and the team behind The WAR Project are rebuilding a massive cut questline from The Witcher 3 centered on the Catriona plague, and a playable demo is already live on Nexus Mods. The full release is targeting 2027 — the same year CD Projekt plans to drop its official Songs of the Past expansion.

The cut content was uncovered by dataminers years ago. In its original form, the questline would have had Geralt team up with familiar faces to take down a Nilfgaard-aligned medic named Hector Kraft-Ebbing, who was running some deeply shady plague experiments. Characters like Vernon Roche, Ves, and Thaler were slated for key roles, and both The Witcher 2's Scoia'tael commander Iorveth and The Witcher 1's Vizima city guard captain Vincent Meis were planned to appear — neither made it into the final game at all. Some scraps of the questline survived as the quests An Eye for an Eye and Reason of State, which the modders are also rewriting to fit the restored storyline.

The current demo includes four quests: Partisans And Vultures, No Man's Land Investigation, Unusual Impressions, and a rewritten An Eye for an Eye. Eight more quests are either in progress or not yet started. To make everything fit cleanly, the team has had to cut two existing quests from the main game — one of them added by the next-gen update — and push back the start points of several major storylines.

The finished mod, according to the team, will rival a full expansion at 10-plus hours of content, with the door left open for additional quests later. To try the demo you need the latest version of The Witcher 3 and should follow the installation instructions on the mod page carefully.