Who needs new RPGs in 2024 when The Witcher 3 modding scene is about to explode?

•  Skyrim continues to be massively more popular than The Witcher 3, in large part thanks to its larger modding community.
•  The upcoming ‘Quest Editor’ tool for The Witcher 3 could potentially inspire a new wave of modding and creative content in the game, giving it its ‘Skyrim’ moment.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Two RPG giants that are, arguably, the best of their respective generations and two of the greatest RPGs ever made. I wouldn’t really know how to choose between them if I had to. On the one hand, The Witcher 3 marked such a jump up in storytelling and characterisation that it almost makes the basic-ass potato-people of Skyrim and their troubles look laughable by comparison, but there’s also something beautiful in the anonymity of wandering around the harsh northern realm and carving out a character of your exact choosing. I love both games, even though I think Bethesda could learn more from CDPR at this point than the other way round.

But there’s a good reason why right at this moment, 13 years on from when Skyrim came out and eight years on from The Witcher 3, Skyrim-related search queries dwarf The Witcher 3’s by a ratio of about 16:1 (as per Google Trends). Now that’s not a reflection of the games’ respective sales, which are quite close at over 50m units for The Witcher 3 and over 60m units for Skyrim. And you can bet it’s not people digging into the lore and things like that.