CD Projekt hires community mod makers to work on Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077's official modding support appears set to take a big step forward: CD Projekt has hired the creators of the Wolvenkit modding toolset to further develop the resources that are available to the modding community.

"We are extremely pleased to announce that @Blumster, @Nightmarea, @rfuzzo and I will be joining CDPR under my and @Nightmarea's company (https://yigsoft.dev/)," Hambalkó "Traderain" Bence wrote on the Cyberpunk 2077 Modding Community Discord. "We will be working on various projects related to the Cyberpunk 2077 backend and the game's modding support. We are really excited for this and we really hope we can help to bring Cyberpunk 2077 to the next level!"

CD Projekt confirmed the hire in a statement sent to PC Gamer. "We are working with Yigsoft on the development of Cyberpunk 2077 modding tools," a studio rep said. "The modding community has always been very important to us and we are happy to be working with them side by side on further expanding the tools which are available to modders."

The Yigsoft team is well known in the community as the people behind Wolvenkit, an open-source project that provides a unified modding toolset for RED Engine games—that is, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Cyberpunk 2077—and their hiring has prompted both excitement and some trepidation among Cyberpunk fans. Some people in this Reddit thread question how much of Cyberpunk 2077 they'll actually be able to improve, and others—inevitably—criticize the fact that it was necessary to hire members of the modding community in the first place. But for the most part, players are happy to see CD Projekt committing to better mod support in the future.

Neither CD Projekt nor Bence commented on what exactly the Yigsoft Team will be doing in its new role or when we'll begin to see the fruits of their labors, but Moritz "rfuzzo" Baron clarified on Discord that Wolvenkit is not being officially adopted by CD Projekt: Yigsoft's work at the studio "is completely independent of the work that has been done by the community." Fortunately, he also confirmed that despite the new gig, the team does not plan to abandon Wolvenkit, which has always been—and will continue to be—a hobby.

"That our dream of working for CDPR (and working on the things we love and so far could only do in our spare time) has come to life, has no impact on the state of the open source project that is WolvenKit," he wrote. "By contrast, I feel even more motivated now to spend time on the game and the mod tools!"

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Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.