Experimental Restored Content - Ice Skating

Overview

When talking about Witcher 3 cut content CDPR devs have often mentioned that they were going to have a section of the game where you would control Ciri while ice skating. This section was going to be in the quest On Thin Ice and would have featured the fight with Caranthir and run up to it. While these combat sections with Ciri are still present in the current version of On Thin Ice, they do not feature the ice skating mechanic which was cut in early 2014. The developers often cite not wanting to introduce a new mechanic so late in the game as the reason for cutting ice skating among other issues.

By some absolute miracle almost all of CDPR's work on this mechanic still survives in the current game's files. Pretty much all of the necessary scripts, animations, and behavior graphs to restore this mechanic at the prototype level it was left at are still present. It should be noted that this mechanic was a VERY big work in progress at the time it was cut. It was almost as if the developers were right in the middle of coding and debugging it and some manager walked in and told them to stop. A lot of stuff here was still in the process of being figured out and sorted out by CDPR themselves. With this mod I have done my best to restore this mechanic to a playable state so that people could play around with it and see what the ice skating mechanics were all about. You can watch a short video demonstrating what I have restored here.

Please keep in mind that unlike some of the other restored content mods you may have seen this bit of content was never actually finished by CDPR themselves and everything here was very prototype and not intended to be see in the finished product. Most of what you see here is the work of CDPR but I have done my best to fill in some of the gaps and make this a playable mechanic but I am not a professional video game developer so expect this to still be very prototype and unfinished. Also keep in mind that there are no quests, dialogue, sounds, or items associated with this mechanic in the game files or included with this mod. Ciri will also not wear any ice skates or have any unique appearance when Ice Skating. CDPR either never made any or they were stripped from the game files before release. I would only recommend installing this as something to play around with and to avoid playing any actual quests with it. The mechanic is buggy and will likely break something so I suggest only using it when roaming around. White Orchard or Kaer Morhen would be the ideal maps to try this in as Ciri can move quite fast while skating and there may be problem with asset streaming on denser maps.

What this mod restores

This mod only restores the Ice Skating gameplay mechanic for Ciri access