With The Witcher 3: Songs of the Past confirmed and The Witcher 4 predicted to come out within the next year or two, you might be itching to play through the trilogy once more, if not to just take the third game for a fresh spin.
But playing it as the developers intended isn’t the best way to experience The Witcher 3. Since the release of the comprehensive REDKit modding tools, players have created more elaborate, complex, and detailed modifications, and going without them leaves a lot of good vibes on the table.
So, here are our recommended mods for a new TW3 run.
Best Witcher 3 mods
Before I begin, I would like to remind you that you will need Witcher 3 Script Merger to be able to run these mods together. If you just pick one out and decide that’s enough, you won’t need it. However, all of the mods on this list can be enabled at the same time, so long as you do your merging correctly.
Each mod has its own steps on how to be merged or made compatible with the rest, so make sure you check their Nexus descriptions.
Vladimir UI
- What it does: Overhauls the game’s UI and HUD.
- Nexus link
Vladimir UI is perhaps the best UI and HUD mod for The Witcher 3, as it completely overhauls the game’s default menus, map, mini-map, quest markers, and more, with a fair bit of customizability that lets you tailor it to your liking. It takes a lot from the previous The Witcher games, chiefly The Witcher 2, and combines it with the creator’s own imagination to create a comprehensive and beautiful UX for CDPR’s flagship title.
The Witcher 3 Enhanced Edition
- What it does: Overhauls combat, leveling, gearing, scaling, alchemy, and pretty much every system in the game.
- Nexus link
If you’re starting The Witcher 3 for the umpteenth time, then it might suit you to change things up a bit. TW3EE completely overhauls the game by introducing a new combat system based on parrying and deflecting, changing the leveling and alchemy to actually make them mean something, and adding a lot of depth to the otherwise shallow systems of the base The Witcher 3.
It is highly customizable, and you can outright disable some aspects, leaving the core of the experience up to you to tinker with. It’s my favorite mod alongside Vladimir UI, and I cannot recommend it enough. Just be prepared to get your ass kicked.
Gwent Redux
What it does: Expands Gwent to a significant degree, adds lore-friendly cards, enhances existing ones, and makes Gwent an actual challenge.
Gwent Redux is a much simpler mod than the rest, but I think I couldn’t ever play Gwent without it again. It adds so many cool cards and makes basically everything useful to some extent, outside of the Piss Poor Infantry cards you’ll want to get rid of ASAP.
Like most mods on this list, it makes the game much deeper and more meaningful, and collecting them all becomes an actual interest rather than an achievement chore.
Brothers in Arms
What it does: Restores a lot of cut content from the games and fixes an untold number of bugs and issues.
This mod is the reason I love the modding community. Games like The Witcher 3 had to cut a good chunk of their content, usually for good reasons and primarily due to time constraints and budgetary issues, which isn’t to say that a lot of that content wasn’t finished or close to being so.
Thus, this mod restores an untold amount of content that CDPR removed from the game prior to its release, fixes a good number of bugs remaining in the latest version of The Witcher 3, and gives you optional cut content to restore that can fundamentally change some quests or parts of the title.
It’s a great mod and one that you should definitely never go without, no matter what.
Honorable mentions for graphics enthusiasts
- Super Turbo Lighting mod – Significantly improves weather and lighting in the game.
- RTX Mirrors – So you can see reflections in mirrors; requires ray tracing.
- RT Water Reflection fix – Fixes the water reflections when RT is enabled.
- All-in-One RT Performance fix – Potentially improves FPS when RT is enabled.
- No artificial player light – Geralt doesn’t glow in the dark, good for RT.
- RenoDX Native HDR Fix – Reshade plugin that fixes the game’s broken HDR.
