This Witcher 3 mod that lets you play as a custom character or a whole new sorceress class is super promising, but maybe wait a few months for it to iron out the kinks

One of the great strengths of The Witcher 3 is its star, Big Geralt—a character we as players get to guide through the game's major events, but with a defined history and personality giving those decisions added heft. Geralt isn't a blank amnesiac Chosen One like so many RPG heroes, and I love that—it's clear the writing, acting, and quests are all built around who he is and how he can leave his mark on the world around him. That focus makes a new mod for the game called Custom Player Characters all the more impressive, because it does a pretty dang good job of turning Geralt into any other character you'd like to play as.

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I saw Custom Player Characters getting some talk this week and decided to install it for myself, a process that made me suspect the folks who've written about it haven't tried it. It's a bit of a bear: I had to download the mod itself, four supplemental mods, unzip them all in the base game folder, then download a Script Merger tool to make them all play nicely together. They didn't play nicely together, giving me some kind of scripting error when I tried to launch the game; either I messed something up or an older mod that I haven't touched in years got in the way. Anyway, after an hour of deleting files, re-extracting everything and attempting to launch the game half a dozen times I finally got it going. 

Custom Player Characters works on an existing save file and is accessible from just about the very beginning of the game, as you and Vesemir are making your way to White Orchard. It pops a Chameleon potion into your inventory, and once you drink it you'll enter a character creation screen that lets you choose from the hundreds and hundreds of character models in The Witcher 3 and even mix body parts as you replace Geralt with a custom witcher. The bigger draw is playing as a «witcheress» (did we really need a gendered