The WAR Project will recreate Witcher 3's cut Catriona Plague questline in 10 hours

The Witcher 3 mod team behind The WAR Project says it will recreate the Catriona Plague questline as a 10-hour, 12 quest expansion, built from details datamined in 2024 by Moonknight, Ferroxius, Crygreg, and Glassfish. And yes, the project has a specific hook beyond “more Witcher content”: it aims to bring back Iorveth, the elven rebel from The Witcher 2, including the questline that never made it into the final game.

The plan is also already in motion in a way many ambitious mod projects never achieve. The team says The WAR Project is 25% complete, with Geralt’s romance with Ves already implemented, and a demo available on Nexus Mods. The same Witcher 3 specialist, xLetalis, is assisting with production and helped share details publicly. The punchline for players and for anyone tracking how communities build long-running pipelines: they are already casting voice roles because one major component is missing, the original voice lines are lost to time.

To understand why this matters, you have to remember what The Catriona Plague represented in the cut version of the story. In the final game, the disease ravaging Velen mostly functions as background texture. The datamined and now-recreated questline was supposed to go much more deeply into that plague, and it also would have pulled in key character DNA from The Witcher universe. That includes Iorveth’s return, which is the kind of “it should never have been cut” storyline detail that mod communities live for. When a mod targets narrative scope like this, it is not just adding quests. It is trying to restore a missing emotional and thematic arc.

The War Project is also positioning itself as more than a one-character nostalgia play. The source says it reintroduces and/or expands on several characters in The Witcher 3. That includes a proper romance between Geralt and Ves, plus extra demonic shenanigans from Gaunter O’ Dimm. O’ Dimm is the primary antagonist of Hearts of Stone, and CD Projekt originally planned to introduce him in this quest. In other words, the mod is effectively bridging a story-world thread that the base game did not fully connect, turning what was previously a planned-but-missing narrative beat into playable content.

Mechanically and visually, the team is leaning into escalation. O’ Dimm’s return is tied to new demonic enemies for Geralt to fight, alongside specialist Nilfgaardian soldiers wearing rad-looking vulture masks. Those details matter because they point to production reality. Recreating a cut questline at this scale requires not only writing quests, but also building encounters, enemy behavior, and assets that fit the tone of the base game. In a market where many mods struggle to go beyond “cool quest idea” into “consistent gameplay,” The War Project’s stated scope, 10 more hours and 12 new quests, is a bet on completeness.

Now here is the part that turns this from a fun fandom headline into an operational story. Voice acting. The team says the mod currently lacks voice acting because the original voice lines for these quests are sadly lost to time. That means the team is casting for numerous roles in both English and Polish, including Doug Cockle’s Geralt voice. The source frames the challenge: Doug Cockle’s tones are described as “gravelly,” with the mod team saying it is “challenge level: impossible.” If you can match that, the path is auditions via the mod’s Discord.

So the risk is not just “will they finish?” It is “will they finish credibly?” In mod development, missing audio is a classic limiter because it touches immersion, timing, and quality control. The workaround, casting new voices, adds another layer of scheduling and performance risk. Still, the project is aiming to ship in February 2027. That date is called “a teensy bit optimistic” in the source, especially since the team says it is only a quarter done. But that is also the point: the project is doing the kind of planning and community mobilization that turns a good idea into a multi-year production. Even if the timeline shifts, the direction is clear.

For executives and operators in the broader game ecosystem, the second-order signal is how communities replicate “cancelled content” pipelines. The War Project is built on datamining and modding labor, with veteran contributors who have already shipped related work. Moonknight and Glassfish are credited with contributing to the Brothers in Arms mod, which restores a darker ending to the Hearts of Stone expansion. That history matters because it suggests the team understands narrative restoration as an iterative craft, not a one-off mod drop.

The strategic stake is simple: this is a proof point that the lost narrative in a commercial release can still be monetized in attention, engagement, and ecosystem trust, even years later. It is also a reminder that the “lost voice” problem does not stop projects, it forces them into new production modes. And for anyone building ambitious community content, The War Project is the case study: start with datamined truth, lock an expansion scope, ship a demo early, recruit talent for the hardest missing component, and then manage expectations around a finish date you may not hit. February 2027 might be far, but the casting and the 25% status mean the countdown has already begun.