Sick of The Witcher 3's Roach? Its MMO mod now lets you ride other players instead

I'll take any excuse to return to The Witcher 3, and while multiplayer mod Witcher Online isn't the full co-op adventure I'd love to see CD Projekt Red consider for The Witcher 4, it brings a gleeful shared experience to the world. Inspired by MMORPGs, it fills your game with other players, setting you free to hang out in taverns, roleplay, or just get into scraps. The team behind it, helmed by modder 'rejuvenate,' has just launched a big 2.0 overhaul, which includes item trading, full syncing for horses, boats, and animal morphs, and even the ability to ride other players around town.

Don't think of Witcher Online as a complete co-op experience, as there's no quest or NPC syncing, although you could coordinate a simultaneous playthrough with a friend if you wish by simply progressing side-by-side. Instead, it turns The Witcher 3 into a shared world akin to Red Dead Online. It boasts "full movement, combat, and appearance sync with other players," and supports model customization using the popular 'Custom Player Characters' mod, allowing you to step out of Geralt's shoes entirely. It also incorporates the 'Chill Out' mode for more ways to relax in taverns and engage in roleplaying.

For the 2.0 overhaul, the mod team has greatly enhanced the ways you can interact with other people in your game. Both horses and boats now support the ability to have multiple players on them at once, with one person driving and the others as passengers. You can also change the look of your steed if you wish, with a selection including those used by the Wild Hunt, and even a unicorn.

Want to go one step further? There's also the option for 'player riding,' and despite what you might have been getting up to in the single-player side of the RPG, this isn't as dirty as that sounds. Instead, you're able to sit on the shoulders of other characters and be ferried around as they go about their business. If they mount a horse or get into a boat, you'll be moved to a passenger seat. Impressively, there's even the ability to stack several adventurers into a big tower, giving you the freedom to relax while one does all the hard work.

A new player interactions menu has been added, which is where you can activate both the shoulder-mounting feature and the new item trading interface. This lets one person choose the item they wish to buy along with the price they're prepared to pay. If their offer is accepted, the trade is made. You can always reject, and there's the ability to turn on an 'auto-decline trade requests' setting if you don't want to deal with them while on a public server.

The animal transformations from Custom Player Characters have also been integrated, allowing you to turn into creatures such as an owl, cat, fox, or crow and appear in that form in everyone's game. There are 23 new emotes, along with a selection of 'prop emotes' that cause you to engage with the likes of food, bags, cups, and umbrellas. Looping animations can now be canceled midway through using the space bar.

The Witcher Online 2.0 update for The Witcher 3 is available now. You can download it via Nexus Mods, where you'll also find full installation and connection instructions.

The update features a "full client and server rewrite" - lead modder rejuvenate explains, "This is faster and should hopefully reduce connection issues some players are having." The team has also fixed some problems causing lag or connection drops, and now allows multiple players who are using the same IP address to join the public server at the same time.