Why I Do Not Want The Witcher 4, 5 and 6

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As most gamers will know, CD Projekt Red has lately announced that they are going to make not only a Witcher 4, but a whole new trilogy in the next six years. On the face of it, this proposal strikes me as dubious at best, for both practical and artistic reasons, and I have no role here if not to complain about what’s hot.

On the practical side, three Witcher games in six years sounds like a lot, and it sounds like a lot a) because it is a lot, and b) because CDPR has a history of over-promising. The studio has been more of a ‘two big games per decade’ kind of outfit since the 2000s, and even then, they are prone to mismanagement. We are talking about one of the most notorious studios in the world for ‘crunch,’ basically working developers to the brink of death in the months/years leading up to a release (which is technically legal but shouldn’t be).

Ethical implications aside, experience shows that this is no guarantee of a good product. Cyberpunk 2077 was much anticipated, and eventually became a very successful and acclaimed game, but many will remember the glitchy, largely unplayable clusterfuck that it was on release. In the years leading up to Cyberpunk’s debut, many op-eds were published arguing that it would be better for the studio to delay the game, rather than resort to crunch, but crunch they did, and the result took literal years of post-launch revisions to fix.

Whether it was worth it in the end is for others to judge: personally, I found the setting so viscerally unpleasant to be in, the missions so railroady, and the NPCs so unappealing, that I barely scraped through the interminable prologue. In the many hours of backseating my sister’s game, watching blue-haired pornographers talk about gonks, eddies, and braindances, the only character I eventually gave a shit about was Takemura, who I liked less than Mr Brightman.

Whether Cyberpunk was good or bad is really beside the point, though, and, picky and oppositional as I am, my reaction needn’t be taken too seriously. The larger point is that even if Cyberpunk had been the greatest game ever made (as the hype at the time suggested it would be), crunch still would not have been a humane and decent way to proceed, and in an ideal world, the market would be a little more ethical, and more willing to withhold custom from companies that treat staff badly. I like video games, but I would also like the people that make them to be able to see their families, and to not lose years of their finite lifespans to chronic stress.

There’s also the fact that, since Cyberpunk’s release, AI has arrived on the scene, and big companies are already testing the waters to see how much they can get away with. AI is the spectre haunting every creative industry, and, given how much CDPR values profit, and how little their employees, I can’t help but suspect that the planned trilogy will be quietly supplemented with AI code, assets, and maybe even writing. It’s worth noting that the original Witcher trilogy was released over a whole nine years, with the first game in 2007 and the last expansion in 2016, and, while the studio has far more staff and technology at its disposal now than it did then, there are still reasonable grounds to be wary.

On the artistic level, I have to say that I have a hard time getting excited about The Witcher 4/5/6. I had very mixed feelings about the confirmation of Ciri as protagonist, not for misogynist reasons (there was a lot of that going around), but more because this is a character who is so deeply rooted in the novels, of which I am not a fan. I did give the first one a chance last January, and… violently disliked it, for reasons I went into at great length at the time.

The long and the short of it is, Sapkowski keeps being paedophilic, largely about Ciri herself, and I can’t be doing with that. His geopolitical context is also a bore, as it consists of interminable sparring between evil people who all speak with the exact same voice and register. One imagines that this is what shareholder meetings at Blackrock are like. Also, Sapkowski would clearly quite like Yennefer to step on his balls, whereas I would like her to go home and rethink her life, or at least to stop committing sex crimes.

My opinion of the novels, however, isn’t the main thing here, and I don’t begrudge anyone a different view. The problem with Ciri, as I see it, is that she is a book character, therefore a character with screeds and screeds of history exterior to the game. This leaves virtually no room whatsoever for player expression, agency or conjecture, all of which are at least somewhat (I would argue very) important in the roleplaying genre. There is no mystery to Ciri - she is quite literally a major character in a popular Netflix series.1 There is nothing left to speculate about, nothing to infer, no ambiguity that can’t be clarified by a visit to Reddit.

It says something that Bethesda still continues to make money with every new iteration of Skyrim, one of the best big RPGs to allow a player-defined protagonist, instead of a fully pre-written, voiced and designed one. To this day, you’ll still find people who talk about their own Skyrim characters as if they were fully-fleshed out personalities, because despite the game’s very limited dialogue system, the excellent worldbuilding poses questions that feed the imaginitive process. Baldur’s Gate 3, which does much the same thing but more elaborately, rocketed to success,2 and a huge amount of the content that you still see about BG3 today revolves around the different character options available to players, whether those are cosmetic, rare dialogues and reactions, or memorable quest outcomes with implications for characterisation.

Of course, Geralt was also a book character, and one with a lengthy history through the novels, but there was a crucial difference: Geralt originated as a short story protagonist. Therefore, like many a short story hero, he was pretty much built to be dropped into a scenario and observed, and had a certain predictability as a common thread from one story to the next. Like a Western protagonist, Geralt was vividly sketched around a few core traits, and those were his outcast status, his knowledge and expertise, and the recurring conflict between his vocation and his morality.

Moreover, because the short stories were written months or years apart, with the author’s ideas evolving as he wrote, there are inconsistencies and contradictions from one to the next, with some details dropped and new ones substituted. Rather than editing these out, Sapkowski chose to keep them when they were released as collections, and even built a framing narrative around them. The first collection situates each as a particular memory being recounted by Geralt to a listener, and the author thereby introduces the sense that he is an unreliable narrator, which accounts for the inconsistencies and enhances Geralt’s mystique. A huge part of the character’s appeal lies in ambiguity and contradiction, and this in itself becomes another core trait. The witcher is both offputting and endearing, and the author purposely included uncertainties that invite the reader to form their own opinions and conjectures about him.

All of this is a great basis for a video game protagonist, and especially for a game like The Witcher 3, which is remembered as much for its sidequests and expansions as for its main storyline. TW3 has some of the best and most memorable quests in any open-world game, in large part because each functions exactly like a Witcher short story or novella, with Geralt as the common thread, and poses questions not only about the creatures and people he encounters, but also about the witcher himself - is he a man or a mutant? Will he ruthlessly carry out his contract, or find another way? How does he interpret his place in a changing world?

This structure allows for player expression, with one player’s Geralt not necessarily the same as the next. Crucially, little context was required for a player to enter into the spirit of the thing, just as if you had stumbled across a Witcher story in a magazine without necessarily knowing what came before, and without needing to know.

With Ciri, on the other hand, there is a very intricate, detailed, concrete backstory describing every formative experience of her life, without which she is not Ciri,3 and it seems that all of her most fateful decisions have already been made. She has saved the world from the White Frost. She has rejected her royal bloodline and become a witcher. What is left to discuss? What questions can three new games pose about Ciri that haven’t already been answered? Her backstory is also so incredibly traumatic that it seems unlikely that any new disaster will feel impactful.

Maybe this reveals my own lack of imagination: they must have some ideas, surely, or they wouldn’t be announcing three new games with the air of Father Christmas pulling an especially large present from a sack. I would be very happy to be proven wrong.

Still, what little we do know seems, if anything, to contradict the spirit of both the literature and the previous games. Apparently Ciri is going to undergo the Trial of the Grasses, something that is thematically questionable,4 and likely to be very contrived: game-Ciri is already peak plot armour, with her extreme magical powers, special bloodline, and having the ability to [checks notes] to teleport anywhere in the multiverse at will. Having her survive a process that only 3/10 children survive, as an adult (which we’re told is impossible), after saving the world from entropy itself, seems… yeah. She is God’s favourite princess and the most interesting girl in the world.

But of course, she has to go through the Trial, or she won’t have the witcher eyes and the potions, both of which the market fully expects from a Witcher game. Therefore, she must have these characteristics whether it makes sense or not. It’s also obviously going to be a narrative necessity to neutralise her Elder Blood magic, which is incompatible with the kind of gritty, grounded plot that players will expect and want.

There’s also the broader issue that the book series is about a time when monsters are dying out and witchers are becoming obsolete, something that is also heavily alluded to in the short stories. The games lean into this as well, prominently featuring the fortress of Kaer Morhen, a crumbling ruin populated by three aging witchers who no longer train apprentices. The whole focus of the novels is on the Nilfgaardian invasion, a moral and political crisis obviously meant to parallel Nazism from the Polish perspective, which forces Geralt to reconsider his isolationist worldview.

I only know the broad strokes of the books, but I am told that Ciri’s arc amidst all of this is to recognise that her role as an aspiring witcher is not to protect people from the dwindling monsters, but to protect them from other people.

However, all of the new trailers and promotional materials are implying that a major part of Ciri’s role is going to be about hunting monsters, something that should really be of less importance in the post-invasion world. But again, the market demands monsters, because the concept and image of the Witcher game series is all about hunting monsters, whether it makes narrative sense or not. (If nothing else, Ciri training for a profession that no longer exists/should not exist is going to be very relatable for Gen Z.)

Now, obviously, I assume that the monsters will be overshadowed by human villains, because that is the whole point of the series, and an articulate, recognisable threat is needed to sustain the kind of narrative people recognise as Witcher over a whole trilogy. But is this not just a re-tread of the first three games, which are themselves a re-tread of the books? Are we not just going to be getting a re-tread of a re-tread, which will be entirely predictable? Is this not the rebootification plague we see in cinema? Must we scrape every barrel?

The tendency of capitalism is to generate endless iterations of things that make money, and of course games have to make economic sense. Still, I can’t help but think that a studio like CDPR can afford to take risks, and in fact it was risk-taking and doing something new that made them their name and their fortune in the first place.

Would I like to see another big fantasy RPG5 from CDPR? Of course. Would I like to see three new Witcher games, with the same story beats as every previous Witcher game, but more contrivance and fewer mysteries? No, not really.

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