This Witcher 3 mod painstakingly recreates the UI and HUD from E3 2014 demo

This version of The Witcher 3's HUD was never released, but modders made it real.



The Witcher 3 is one of those RPGs that people just keep on playing and keep on modding. Our roundup of the Witcher 3's best mods include some projects that are still ongoing and totally rework combat and leveling into a different sort of RPG, while other mods are hellbent on making the game look like it did in early demos. To that end, a recent mod called E3 UI and HUD promises to restore The Witcher 3's interface to what it looked like in 2014, a year before CD Projekt finished the game. Overall it makes the menus and map a little more flavorful and less utilitarian, which could be a nice change if you already know The Witcher 3 like the back of your hand.

Some details about the mod, from its Nexus page: most of the menus now have an animated background, the HUD has unique Xbox button icons styled after the 2014 demo's, there's a new font, unique loading screens for traveling within a region to different signposts, a monster tracker that shows the beast you're after if you're on a monster hunt, and an integrated live bestiary. The map offer the biggest change: it now looks hand drawn and most of the icons are gone by default.

There are some options that come with the HUD as well: the new (old) map and minimap can be disabled altogether, as can the animated backgrounds, and there's a toggle to turn on the map legend if you need help finding a particular destination or point of interest.

"You may also have noticed the missing level indicator on monster no matter whether you have scaling on or off," the mod page says. "This is an intentional design decision. There was no level indicator at E3 and as faithful e3 fanatics we are, we kept that. We suggest to just play with enemy scaling on, as this is (in our opinion) the prefered way to play anyway. However there is a way to roughly know if an enemy is too high leveled for you to fight : if an enemy name is red, that means he's much higher than you and you probably should run away from the fight. If the name is E3 brown, feel free to wreck him."

Installing the mod is as simple as unzipping the files into the Witcher 3 directory and making a quick edit to an input settings file. You can download the mod, and see more screenshots, at its Nexus Mods page here.