How do you end up working on The Witcher 4 ? Well, it turns out one member of the team ended up there due to some modding work they were doing in the free time they had around being a beetroot farmer. They're certainly not the only CD Projekt dev who got their industry start that way, either Pawel Sasko, who's currently the associate game director on Cyberpunk 2077's sequel, discussed how important bringing on board former modders has been for the developer in a recent interview with Flow Games . One particular case he highlighted was that of Witcher 4 senior quest designer Eero Varendi, who was orignally brought on board by CD Projekt after the company spotted one of the mods he'd made while off-duty from growing veggies.
"There was a video on YouTube that appeard, about a guy who, without complelely without [the official] modding toolset, started remaking The Witcher 1's prologue in The Witcher 3 ," Sasko recalled, "I saw the video and I was like, 'damn this is such high quality work, so I asked [CD Projekt narrative director Philipp Weber], who is a modder, 'do you know this guy in the community?' and he said, 'yeah, yeah I know who he is'. [I said] 'message him and tell him to send us his CV.' He sent me the CV and we did the test, the test was wonderful.
He was great. He did [a] great design test." Sasko went on to say that this led to conversations about bringing Varendi, an Estonian who was in his early twenties and working on a beetroot farm in Australia at the time, .