The announcement of The Witcher 4 with The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt's Ciri as protagonist has attracted a bit of discussion. Some of the reaction is online toddlers waxing wroth about a video game having a (somewhat older!!!) woman as lead character, and especially, shock, a video game in a series that has hitherto starred a man. And some of it is people commenting more thoughtfully on whether Ciri genuinely makes for a suitable Witcher protagonist, given that she isn't the product of the typical Witcher genetic modification regime (which is heavily tailored towards men), and given that, without spoiling too much, she has gifts that make crumbly old Geralt's sword-and-sorcery skillset look rather paltry.
Speaking to Eurogamer this week, game director Sebastian Kalemba and narrative director Philipp Weber responded to a few of these comments, and also shared a little about Ciri's situation at the start of the game.
]]>Quick, the world is in peril, your adopted daughter is under threat, and nearby villagers are being terrorised by monsters. What do you do? Oh, you're sitting down at a cosy table in the local tavern. You're playing a card game with a dude called "Aldert". The wind outside is howling, and so are the nightwraiths, but you're just sitting there. Playing another "cow" card. Okay.
Guess you'll be happy to learn that the Witcher 4 developers have more or less confirmed that Gwent will be making a return in the recently trailered Ciri-led sequel.
]]>CD Projekt have screened the first trailer for The Witcher 4, the next instalment in their fantasy monster-slaying series. It’s another single player open world RPG, and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’s Ciri is the protagonist. In fact, she's the protagonist for a whole new Witcher saga, though there’s a tease at the end of the footage that crusty old Geralt may return as well.
]]>Just when you thought you'd played all the RPGs - maxed every last stat, drained the XP of every last creature, tap-danced your way along every branching questline - CD Projekt have announced that The Witcher 4 is in "full-scale production".
]]>CD Projekt Red are continuing to bulk up the team developing The Witcher 4 - officially codenamed Polaris - with two-thirds of the studio now working on the follow-up to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Meanwhile, the team working on Cyberpunk 2077 has shrunk to fewer than 20 people, less than half the number working on its upcoming sequel.
]]>The next Cyberpunk game from CD Projekt - currently codenamed "Orion" - might have multiplayer in it, according to co-CEO Michal Nowakowski. Please let it be some kind of deckhead 'passenger-seat-driver' mode, where you get to play a crusty celeb uploaded to another character's brain implants, who strolls around the landscape as a hologram, offering passive-aggressive commentary. Watch those corners, samurai! Hey, you missed an ammo pack. SAMURAI ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME.
It'll be a while till we find out for sure: Orion is still in the conceptual phase, with CD Projekt expecting to have about 80 people working on it by the end of this year. The higher priority in 2024, it seems, is the next big steaming helping of The Witcher.
]]>CD Projekt RED's Colin Walder, engineering director for management and audio, has shared a few thoughts on how the Polish developer's next Witcher RPG, codenamed Polaris, will improve on the cataclysmic development of Cyberpunk 2077. There's not a lot to share at this stage, of course, but what there is sounds like a step in the right direction.
]]>There's a side mission in Cyberpunk 2077 that involves abducting a notorious union-breaker. One wonders if any of the people who worked on that have joined the union founded by CD Projekt RED employees this month. The union is part of the larger Polish worker's organisation OZZ Inicjatywa Pracownicza, and comes in response to CD Projekt's firing around 100 employees in July due to "overstaffing". Its membership is anonymous and open to people in the industry who aren't employed by the Witcher and Cyberpunk studio, but are thinking about forming a union in their own workplace.
"We started talking about unionizing after the 2023 wave of layoffs when 9% of Reds (that is roughly 100 people) were let go," reads an official FAQ from the group. "This event created a tremendous amount of stress and insecurity, affecting our mental health and leading to the creation of this union in response. Having a union means having more security, transparency, better protection, and a stronger voice in times of crisis."
]]>Dunno if you've heard, but they're making a new Witcher game. Sounds cool, I love indie games. Anyway, it's now been confirmed that the animal medallion they teased a few days ago was a lynx.
"Ok, some mysteries should not be so mysterious," CD Projekt Red's global communication director Robert Malinowski said to Eurogamer. "I can confirm that the medallion is, in fact, shaped after a lynx." So there you go, it's all solved. Except, hang on, I still have no idea what that means.
]]>Well, well, well. Last night CD Projekt said they're working on a new Witcher game. All we've got to go on is a cryptic image of a lynx-like Witcher medallion sitting in a bed of snow. Some of us from the Treehouse ran through what we'd like to see from The Witcher 4, including some truly insightful quotes about leg muscles from myself. One thing I failed to mention, though, was Roach, Geralt's horse.
I'm sure Roach has a great personality, I'm sure he's very kind. But from a purely professional standpoint, I can't stand him. He's hardly smooth in the stirrups, nor can he really climb anything substantial. That's why I'd like Roach swapped out for Elden Ring's Torrent, a horse-goat that corners like Colin McCrae and double jumps like Super Mario. The Witcher 4 deserves a super horse like Torrent.
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