The Witcher 3 “Custom Player Characters” Mod – YouTube

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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.

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. 

Ubisoft has apologized for using the flag of a real-life Japanese reenactment group in concept art for Assassin’s Creed Shadows, and says the images in question will no longer be used—although it will still appear in the art book that comes with the Assassin’s Creed Shadows collector’s edition.

As noted by Siliconera, the issue came to light in June when Japanese gamers noticed the flag of Sekigahara Teppotai in official Assassin’s Creed Shadows concept art. It’s difficult to make out but you can see it in the right-hand side of this image, via IGN:

A closer look:

Sekigahara Teppotai, as it turns out, is a real-life historical reenactment group, and the flag was used without permission. 

Twitter user @matchlock_kage, a member of the group, eventually contacted Ubisoft Japan about the presence of the flag, telling the company that if they wanted to use it, they should contact the group first—a reasonable request by any measure.

They also posted a photo of the group’s flag, taken in 2019:

And here’s one of the reenactment group itself, originally posted in 2023. The flag is clearly visible:

It took some time, but on June 28 @matchlock_kage said they were told that Ubisoft was looking into it, and was attempting to contact Sekigahara Teppotai. A week later, Ubisoft finally responded to the complaint: @matchlock_kage said Ubisoft “accepted the criticism about the concept art and promptly deleted it from the official website,” and said the flag would not be used in the future, although “they also mentioned that data that has already been copied is difficult to delete.”

World of Warcraft’s developers did an abrupt about-face after largely refusing to acknowledge player feedback during the Shadowlands expansion that nearly killed the game. With the MMO’s 10th expansion, The War Within, on the horizon, game director Ion Hazzikostas told PC Gamer that Blizzard is more willing than ever to re-examine WoW’s basic systems to stay in tune with what players want.

“The last few years really have been a time of introspection and reexamination of all of the building blocks, the design DNA, of WoW,” he said. “Turning over every stone holding it up to the light and examining it and asking ourselves, ‘This clearly served us well for a long time, is it still the right thing for our players in 2024?’