Witcher 3 “Storybook” Mod Restores Loading Story Recaps

A mod named Storybook is bringing back a long-cut feature from The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt that many players never saw—interactive summaries of key story events that originally played only during loading screens. The mod adds a new in-game menu so you can review narrative highlights on demand, with optional behavior to suppress the loading-screen videos entirely.

Announcement: “Storybook” restores the cut events panel

The mod, released by a creator using the handle Glassfish777, reintroduces an unfinished UI feature prepared by CD Projekt Red before the 2015 launch. After installing the mod, players get a new “Events” menu in the Glossary section. From there, you can browse all story recap sequences available in the game.

These are short, animated scenes with Jaskier as narrator. In the base game, they typically play only on the relevant loading screens when you either load a save or reach the next story checkpoint. With Storybook installed, those recaps can be viewed whenever you want, in any order, without waiting for a loading transition.

What changed: mod functionality and quality-of-life options

Restores the cut recap menu as a dedicated “Events” panel inside the Glossary
Lets players play the story recaps at any time and choose the order
Includes added UI features such as skipping, subtitles, and automatic music muting
Reworks the panel to match the UI style from the 2016 interface update
Uses existing in-game translated text (no new translations added)
Optional module can remove recap videos from loading screens while keeping them accessible from the menu

Practical impact: better access to story beats, even on old saves

The menu is designed around a simple layout: a list of available clips on the left, and on the right the clip titles and developer-written descriptions. Recaps unlock automatically as you progress through the campaign, and—importantly—the mod’s tracking system has been active since the game’s launch.

That means you can use Storybook on older playthroughs and long-standing saves without starting over, since the game already keeps track of what you’ve unlocked in the background.

There’s also a notable fix for something many players likely missed: several recap videos are made of two parts, but the second part was rarely shown in normal gameplay. The game prioritizes the most recently unlocked recap, which can cause earlier clip segments to be skipped. Storybook automatically combines both parts, so some viewers may see the full set of material that was previously hard to catch.

Platform and scope: where it applies and what’s required

Storybook is designed for PC and targets the base game UI behavior around recap playback. The optional “no loading recap” module works differently than a simple toggle: because the engine stores which recap videos are currently active directly in save files, you’ll need to save the game after installing or removing the optional module for the change to take effect.

What comes next: long development history, now unlocked

Although the mod appeared now, its development started earlier. The first attempt to restore the panel was made in 2022 by a modder known as Fabian (Tinnaib), but progress stalled after hitting a major UI-related error that couldn’t be solved with the available mod tools at the time.

Work resumed after RedKIt launched in 2024, when newly provided UI interface sources from CD Projekt Red made it possible to fix the issue and bring the panel up to a publishable quality.