I was surprised to see The Witcher 4 open this year’s Game Awards ceremony. The trailer for the upcoming game from Polish studio CD Projekt Red was both unexpected and exciting. But I admit to having some mixed feelings about several aspects of the trailer and the implications of Ciri as the next game’s protagonist. Indeed, Ciri will be the protagonist of the next three games, starring in her very own trilogy.
First, there’s the bizarre new look for the character. She just doesn’t look at all like Ciri from The Witcher 3. It’s not just that she’s older. Her entire bone structure has changed. Her face looks different and her voice has changed far more than mere aging would dictate. (While Doug Cockle returns as the voice of Geralt, Jo Wyatt is not returning as Ciri—more’s the pity). So while I think she still looks fine and sounds fine, it’s a radical and jarring enough transformation that if I didn’t have the scar to go by, I wouldn’t know she was the same character at all.
This brings up perhaps an even more important issue with The Witcher 4. Should Ciri even be the main playable character in a series about Witchers? There’s much debate over whether she is or isn’t an actual Witcher, for one thing. Following the release of the trailer, however, CDPR confirmed that in this version of the story Ciri has taken Trial of Grasses, giving her the mutations necessary to drink potions and have her eyes change like that. It’s possible she went to a different school than Geralt (Wolf) such as the school of the Lynx.
Frankly, I’m okay with Ciri having somehow become a full-blown Witcher even if it breaks lore, because I can accept the games are and always have been different from the books. But what does this mean for Ciri’s own magical powers? She has the Elder Blood in her, which is one reason she couldn’t take the Trials (the other being she’s a woman, and Witchers are always men). Has she lost her powers? The trailer indicates that she has at least some of them, but surely this also shows us a huge downgrade from where she was at the end of The Witcher 3.
A Ciri game where she traveled through space and time, had teleportation powers and other abilities, could be really cool on its own, but it wouldn’t really be a game about a monster-hunting mutant Witcher, either.
What I’ve been hoping for since The Witcher 2 was a fully customizable Witcher that players could build from the ground up. Again, I’d be more than happy to bend lore and make this a male or female character that players could choose and then customize the appearance, voice, etc. This would add greatly to our roleplaying options. That being said, CDPR seems to realize that players want room to shape their own character, and since Ciri is at the start of her Witcher journey—as opposed to Geralt, who was already a veteran monster hunter—players will have “more opportunities to be able to feel that they define their experience.”
The other issue with having Ciri as the protagonist is the timeline. A lot of people were hoping for a new timeline entirely, set either much earlier or later than Geralt’s story. (And some gamers were just upset Geralt wasn’t the lead, but his story was told and CDPR has said for years that he wasn’t returning as the hero).
Still, when all is said and done I really like Ciri as a character and I think this could be a great game. The trailer is dark and exciting, and even though that last line—“There are no gods here, only monsters”—is super derivative of the debut Witcher 3 trailer—“What are you doing? “Killing monsters”—it nevertheless has me excited to play. Sometime in 2028 or whenever it finally releases.
P.S. People have noted that Geralt in this cinematic trailer didn’t look exactly like Geralt in The Witcher 3, so it’s possible Ciri will follow suit. I don’t think this is a very good argument. For one thing, he looked pretty close. For another, you only barely see his face the entire time, whereas you see lots and lots of Ciri’s in The Witcher 4 trailer.
The other argument I’ve heard about appearances is that Geralt also changed from game to game. This is certainly true:
But this was also done because A) technology changed radically between each game, and CDPR’s budget and experience grew along with it and B) they made Geralt look more attractive with each game. I don’t think they’ve made Ciri look more attractive or higher fidelity. She just looks different. Almost unrecognizably different.
I think a bit of skepticism is warranted in this day and age of video games and the oft-strange choices developers have been making. Compound that with CDPR’s failed launch of Cyberpunk 2077 and I’d say it makes sense to be cautious. All that being said, I’m still cautiously optimistic. Whatever changes have occurred at the studio, CDPR’s track record is still mostly great and this remains one of my favorite fantasy universes. If nothing else, this trailer has made me want to fire up The Witcher 3 again.
Of course, if CDPR screws up again gamers might not be so lenient. As Geralt once said: “You’d better pay up, or the invisible hand of the market will smack you so hard you won’t sit down for a week.”
