CD Projekt Red could have made Vivienne’s quest much deeper in the «Blood and Wine» expansion to The Witcher 3. Users in REDkit «have unearthed» cut scenes.
Last year, the studio provided REDkit development tools for free. The platform allows not only creating mods but also digging into the game’s data. One of the Reddit users under the nickname InTheZ0n3 found in the model editor two characters named «father» and «mother» — the parents of Vivienne de Tabris, who is the central figure in The Warble of a Smitten Knight. And then the CDPR employee spoke about the curse and the secret ending they gave up.
During the passage Ge’s questralt has to help Vivienne break the curse that turns her into a human/oriole hybrid. If this is not done, the girl will die within seven years. Some of the players tested the veracity of this ending with a meditation — and found that she really did die.
Shortly after the Reddit post, details of the shared Philip Weber, former quest designer at CD Projekt Red and current responsible for for the story in The Witcher 4. According to him, they cut not only Vivienne’s parents, but also the whole scene with the nymph.
The game was supposed to show a flashback where a nymph, angry at the love of Vivienne’s parents, puts a curse on their unborn child. This moment was supposed to explain the origin of Vivienne’s bad luck Moreover, the DLC was supposed to include a secret ending in which Geralt could find the nymph herself, which could change the tone of the entire quest.
This post shows a nice example of how cut content can sometimes also be a good thing. We lost Vivienne’s parents, but gained a Lady of the Lake.
Blood and Wine for the Witcher 3 was a huge expansion, but to make it we still had to cut some scope.
(1/3)https://t.co/XJz4bIFOr9 pic.twitter.com/28vfghTDpy— Philipp Weber (@PhiWeber) June 10, 2025
Although the developers abandoned this plot development, the nymph model was still left in the game. She appears as the Lady of the Lake in another quest, There Can Be Only One, where Geralt receives the sword Aerondight. According to Weber, this character was not originally planned for this quest at all — the model was moved after the scene was cut from the «Blood and Wine» expansion.
The «Blood and Wine» expansion pack was released on May 31, 2016 for PC, PS4, and Xbox One. To date, it was the second and last major DLC for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. This year, the game celebrated its 10th anniversary, to which Xbox has released limited edition controllers. Also later this year PS5 and Xbox Series X/S will get full support for mods.
Source: Game Pressure
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