Merry Witchmas mod for The Witcher

0 comments by 0xCAFE on Jul 17th, 2009 digg this super bookmark

In the beginning Merry Witchmas meant to be a little, humorous adventure. Slightly longer than The Wedding. We orignally planned to publish it before Christmas 2008. But since we didn’t want the task to be too easy for you, we extended the mod several times. The result? We were happy, because the adventure promised to be a really good one, but the community had to spend their Christmas playing the add-on to WoW at best.

The plot was intially quite muddled. The basic concept was there, but we were certain about only a couple of things – it was to be a large-scale, funny and Christmas-y mod. But what next? In the end, we mixed the fear of the greenhouse effect with the style of Ithlin’s prophecy (known from Andrzej Sapkowski's novels), seasoned it with characters from fables which differ quite a bit from The Witcher saga. This adventure is a relatively good example recycling popular culture – we took the motifs known from day-to-day life, literature, films, and games and presented those in a completely new way. You can even find a references to the soap-opera "The Bold and The Beautiful" in the adventure. We challenge you to find it!

Some people, with whom much of the responsibility for the project initially laid, basically failed. They wholly neglected their work and so we had to part company. The vast majority of the improved storyline was written by two other people in just over a week. But as the publishing deadline loomed closer and closer, we had only just entered the testing phase. Needless to say, we didn’t make that deadline.

We’re still a young team and some crew shuffles are inevitable. Most of the current  team hasn’t had much experience with game modding. They had to learn on their mistakes. That’s why we provide publishing dates only when the adventure is almost done and we have started work on the bonus content, like walkthroughs or screenshots.