Featured Image Credit: CD Projekt Red
Topics: The Witcher, Gaming, Technology
Joe Harker
The developers behind The Witcher 3 have addressed the recent controversy around 'realistic genitals' appearing in their game following a next-gen update to the game.
If you consider yourself a gamer, it's likely that you've had some interaction with CD Projekt Red and their incredibly popular third game in The Witcher series.
While the first two were critically acclaimed and convinced audiences there was something interesting going on, it was the third game which really captured attentions and made The Witcher a mighty fantasy franchise.
Released in 2015, The Witcher 3 has sold more than 40 million copies worldwide while becoming one of the most critically acclaimed games of all time.
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It was praised for absolutely fantastic writing, spinning every facet of the game from learning how to craft a health potion to hunting down and slaying a bestiary full of monsters into compelling stories with difficult moral dilemmas.
A pair of hugely successful additions to the adventure in the form of DLC (extra downloadable content) only helped prolong the game's popularity and fuelled a huge surge of interest in the fantasy world created by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski.
It wouldn't be an understatement to say the interest generated by the success of The Witcher 3 helped fuel Netflix's decision to invest heavily in bringing the franchise to TV screens, though fan opinion on how that's going is... varied.
However, The Witcher 3 has been making headlines more than seven years since initially being released for a very specific reason, and that's all because it got a next-gen update which accidentally added 'realistic genitals' into the game.
For those who haven't played The Witcher 3 (and you really should, it's marvellous) there is nudity and some animated bonking does take place, including one particular passionate scene atop a stuffed unicorn.
Still, besides a few bare breasts and bottoms you don't really get a view of any naughty bits as the characters are usually still wearing their undies, and camera angles obscure the bare genitals.
That all changed after the next-gen update where developers CD Projekt Red incorporated a number of community-made mods, including one called 'HD Monsters Reworked'.
This mod revamping the look of many of the monsters in the game also gave the female characters in the game realistic genitals, and the developers have said they're going to remove them.
Apparently the reason for this is because the creator of the 'HD Monsters Reworked' mod incorporated work from the 'Vaginas for Everyone' mod to use on the character models The Crones, with the creator of the latter mod telling Kotaku they believe this to be the case.
These are a trio of witches the player will encounter at various points during the game, including at one point where they're stark naked and eating from a cauldron filled with human remains, and it seems as though the mod's work on them in this scene has ended up in the next-gen update.
Vampire-like villain the bruxa also ended with realistic genitals.
CD Projekt Red told Eurogamer they were 'committed to removing these textures from the game' and in a statement stressed the move was 'not intended as a statement against nudity or mature themes'.
Instead it's supposed to help 'maintain visual coherence across all character models', and the developer has said they didn't intend for this to happen.