Pawel Sasko, who worked as the lead quest designer for Cyberpunk 2077, spoke about the benefits of modding. According to the developer, about half of the quest authors for the next part of Cyberpunk started with amateur modifications.
At the same time, Sasko shared an inspiring story about senior quest designer Eero Varendi. A few years ago, the guy was making mods in the evenings after working on a beet field, and his modification — a remake of the first The Witcher on the engine of the third part — was very much liked by CDPR.
I saw the video and I was like, 'damn this is such high quality work, so I asked [CDPR narrative director Philipp Weber], who is a modder, 'do you know this guy in the community?' and he said, 'yeah, I know who he is," [and I said] message him and tell him to send us his CV.' He sent me the CV and we did the test, the test was wonderful. He was great. He did great design test.
After that, CDPR hired Varendi and moved him from Australia to Poland. Now he is working on the fourth part of the franchise.
Earlier, Sasko talked about his favorite game, in which he spent 1,500 hours. Spoiler: it's an RPG from BioWare.