CD Projekt's Pawel Sasko tells the inspiring tale of how an Estonian beet farmer in Australia became a senior quest designer on The Witcher 4
CD Projekt really likes to hire modders.
One of the big strengths of CD Projekt's Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077 RPGs is that they're so extensively moddable. That's great for players of the game, who get to take advantage of new features and add-ons the original developers never imagined, but it's also good news for budding game developers who dream of one day working in Warsaw. In a lengthy interview with Flow Gaming, CD Projekt's Pawel Sasko said the studio draws extensively from the modding community when it's hiring.
"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 like 24 people right now—half of that are former modders," Sasko said. And not just modders of The Witcher and Cyberpunk: Sasko noted that lead quest designer Błażej Augustynek started out as a StarCraft modder, and said the recently released REDkit modding tools for The Witcher 3 were developed by a team made up entirely of modders.
"I always advise young people when they ask how to get into the industry, I say, 'Go mod. Just go and learn how to mod'," Sasko said. "Start from modding something. There's so many toolkits, so many ways to do it, and really, [some] of the best people that we have are former modders."
To emphasize his point, and presumably the fact that you never know when your big break is going to come, Sasko related the tale of an Estonian beetroot farmer in Australia who ended up joining CD Projekt several years ago after Sasko noticed his work.
"There was a video on YouTube that appeared about a guy who, completely without a modding toolset, started remaking Witcher 1 prologue in Witcher 3. I saw that video and I was like, 'Damn this is such a high quality work'," Sasko said. He asked another employee, who was also a former modder, if he knew the guy, and it turned out he did, so the studio made contact and asked him to submit his CV.
"He sent me the CV and we did the test, the test was wonderful," Sasko said. "He was great. He did a great design test.
"Then we had conversations, and he was I think 20 or 21, and he was at this time in Australia, he was collecting beetroot with a huge combine, like those huge harvesters that are driving and collecting. That's what he was doing, and he was modding in the evenings. So I got him from Australia to Poland, and he's from Estonia and his name's Eero Varendi. Amazing guy. He's a senior right now on Polaris, the new Witcher game, he's obsessed about Witcher."
It's not terribly uncommon for game studios to hire modders as staff, but CD Projekt seems to lean into the scene more enthusiastically than most: Fully half of the current Orion quest team being former modders seems like a very high percentage, and the studio also incorporated fan-made mods into The Witcher 3's 2022 next-gen update. And if nothing else, Sasko's message is definitely inspirational: You may be yoinking root vegetables out of the dusty earth today, but tomorrow? Anything can happen.