The popularity of The Witcher Netflix series is bringing more people to the games than ever, with The Witcher 3 breaking its record for concurrent players on Steam just last week, nearly five years after release with over 100,000 players. It's safe to say that Henry Cavill's Geralt of Rivia carries the same magnetism as Doug Cockle's, the grumpy charmer we know and love.

But why not make the two things we love into one thing we love? Toss a coin to your witcher and toss aside your aversion to the uncanny: we're making a monster—a monster hunter by plastering Henry Cavill's face and body on The Witcher 3's Geralt. 

And we're going to do it right. 

We've already written about the Henry Cavill face mod for The Witcher 3 before, but there's been a steady stream of 'retextures' in its wake. There's also a couple body mods, a sword mod, an armor mod, and plenty more to consider. Let's sift through them all and find the best Henry trimmings for our baked Geralt.

First things first:

The basics

1. Install The Witcher 3 mod manager. It'll make this all a lot easier. While you're at it, pick up a few of our favorite Witcher 3 mods. 

2. Install the Henry Cavill head and body mesh from Adnan over on Nexus Mods. There's an Anya Chalotra head mesh for Yennefer too, if you're interested. You'll need Hearts of Stone for it to work, but you'll want that excellent expansion anyway. 

The faces

Adnan's default Henry:

Adnan did the difficult work of shaping Henry's face and body, but something's wrong the way the light hits it. The furrowed brow, eyes, and cheekbones make our boy look like a damn wraith rather than a macho monster hunter with poison coursing through his veins. This is a great foundation, geometrically speaking, but the retextures are where the magic happens. 

Face score: 4/Henry

Yian's Henry:

A big no-no for me. Our guy is still looking like a weird stunt double. Yian hasn't done much to Adnan's work, though the big draw for this mod is the Hearts of Stone option. If you want to make sure Geralt's runic face drawing fits on Skele-Cavill in the HoS expansion, this is a decent mod to have around, but it's still a little too damp and—I can't quite articulate what's wrong here—inverted? Like one of those hollow-face optical illusions where a concave mask has the appearance of a convex face that follows you where ever you go. It's creepy is what I'm saying. 

Score: Specialty face-tattoo/Mustache removed with CGI

Shadowphonic's Henry:

Now we're talking. Easily my favorite face for the purposes of The Witcher 3. This face darkens Henry a bit by ironically making him paler, which highlights the stubble and contours of his face for a more natural, witchery look, and adds a Striga scar to fit Henry comfortably into the game's timeline. This is the face texture to use. 

Score: Henry/Doug

Finishing touches

The hair

Geralt's hair is a bit longer in the show than the hair the game starts with, so I recommend going with something long as soon as you find a barber. To really accentuate those locks while keeping our beloved hair physics intact, try out CraniumJ's alternative long hair mod. It's glossier and more responsive to wind.

The sword

It ain't a perfect recreation, but we'll take it for now. Dimkich's steel sword mod aims to recreate one of Geralt's Netflix blades for use in The Witcher 3. It's not the most detailed model, a bit too simple with the color and geometry, but at a glance it looks familiar enough.

The armor

This mod's a must, as long as you're willing to forgo the specialty looks and stats the game's armor provides. ReplicantPolice's Viper Armor nails the look of Netflix Geralt's studded leather getup. 

Or just the amulet

If you'd prefer to keep the lovely in-game armor around and just swap out a sigil, Jatodude1's alternate amulets mod will suffice. It changes Geralt's pointy wolf pendant into the show's flat, circular version, and it's supported a good spread of popular armor sets. Ciri and Yen also get new amulets based on the symbols used in the show. 

The spooky toxic eyes 

While there's no dynamic Cavill face mod that looks applies corpse paint in the lavish layers the show goes for as his toxicity increases, we can at least make his eyes turn black and light veins pop around his eyes.

The beard fix 

Cavill doesn't grow much facial hair in the Netflix show, but throughout a playthrough of The Witcher 3, a beard is an inevitability. Problem is, slapping a new face on vanilla Geralt doesn't automatically change where hair is gonna sprout from. This beard mod from Skaters122 replaces the Mutton Chop facial hair with a beard custom built for Henry's square jaw. 

And there you have it. He doesn't animate as well as vanilla Geralt and Cockle's VO is a bit less strained and deep than Cavill's, but we've successfully melded two worlds into one—a conjunctions of spheres, if you will. We're only a few weeks out from the show's release, too, so expect even more Henry mods to trickle out from now until Netflix stops changing Geralt's outfit. With a second season of The Witcher already confirmed, we'll at least get a few more years of this good stuff.

We reported over the weekend that more people were simultaneously playing The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt than were playing it when it first released—which, in case you'd forgotten, was all the way back in 2015. And it's not as if it slouched out the door back then, either: According to Steam Charts, its peak concurrent player count in May 2015 was an impressive 92,268.

That number has continued to climb since the weekend, and today the nearly five-year-old game set another new mark, surpassing 100,000 concurrent players for the first time ever. Breaking into the top five games on Steam is probably out of reach (although I wouldn't count anything out at this point) but muscling past Destiny 2 is impressive enough all on its own.

See for yourself:

This sudden resurgence in popularity, as we noted previously, is almost certainly attributable to the success of The Witcher on Netflix, and curiosity about the game has been easy to indulge thanks to ridiculously good sale prices on The Witcher 3 on Steam and GOG, and free time to sink into it over the holidays. (The fact that it's an outstanding RPG is probably a factor too.)

Those numbers will inevitably decline; even if all the newcomers play it from start to finish, an aged singleplayer RPG isn't going to maintain a player base the way a free-to-play game in active development will. But it's a remarkable testament to how far The Witcher has come since we first encountered it as an oddball RPG in 2007—something Lauren dug into recently with a look at how the series' handling of sex and relationships have evolved from the first game to the last. (Trivia bit: The "romance cards" in the initial Witcher release in North America were censored, while those in European nations were not. The release of the Director's Cut edition made the uncensored cards available everywhere.)

The Witcher 3 is back to its usual price on Steam, but on GOG, the Game of the Year edition is still $15.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt presently has more concurrent players on Steam than it had on launch day in 2015, breaking its own record of 92,000 by several thousand players. At the time of this report more than 94,000 people were playing the game according to SteamDB, Steamcharts, and Valve’s own statistics. That puts it ahead of well-established free games like Path of Exile, Warframe, and Team Fortress 2. Further, the two previous games in the series are both in the top 100 games by player count on Steam, with The Witcher: Enhanced Edition at 12,100 and The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings at 6,600.

These figures are for Steam only, and don’t count players from other distribution platforms like Witcher developer CD Projekt’s own GOG. Most highly-anticipated games never again reach their launch day concurrent player counts, especially single-player ones, so this number is particularly impressive for an RPG. This remarkable success follows last week, when The Witcher 3 surpassed Red Dead Redemption 2 in concurrent players.

The burst of interest in The Witcher is likely due to a combination of the new Netflix series, based on the same books, and the current sale discount on the game—the lowest it has ever been at $11.99 for the base game or $14.99 for the game and its expansions. Those two factors, amplified by the holiday break in Europe and the United States, have made for impressive numbers for the nearly five year old game.

Just imagine time traveling back to 2007 and telling someone that the odd Polish game series with the sexy trading cards was going to become the most successful RPG in the world.