Next Witcher game

No apology was necessary.  There was nothing wrong with your tone, as far as I could tell.  I just disagreed with the content of your post (as I do with the majority of this one, which is largely missing the point I was making and the people that call out for "woke shit" in games are making).


However, in the interest of not dragging this thread into a political shit fight, I'm personally just going to leave it at that.

Well, considering CP77 is coming out in September, I guess they're preparing for a huge Fall this year
</dadjoke>

Well, you can wait for them to disappoint, but if CP77 is at least as good as TW2 I'll be more than happy.
Bioware has been a disappointment since at least Andromeda, they crapped Anthem, rebooted/delayed DA4 and they're still alive, so I'm not worried about CDPR, especially for a game that has come out yet

Due in September.


Cyberstrike: It's been in development in some form or another since 2013. Are there concerns about it living up to the hype? Sure. But everyone can be damned sure CDPR has no one forcing them to rush the game out the door early. They know full well what the expectations are and have not delivered a critical failure yet. This game is far and away their biggest investment, with a team that's double of what they had for TW3. You need to chill my dude.

Regarding the possibility of female witchers appearance - a few screenshots from one of the first versions of the game (from June 2003) appeared some time ago on Twitter. This early version of the game offered a character creator and actually presented a female character on screenshots:

Tweet

Tweet and screenshots are in Polish, but 'wiedźminka' literally means 'witcheress'/female witcher in Polish. Translating the whole sentence: 'And a few pictures with the witcheress. I don't think these have ever appeared anywhere'.

I don't think there would be any point to a Witcher game where you play anything other than a witcher. Beyond that core conceit, the universe has little to set it apart. Spellcasters are fine as a foil to the PC, but the setting's magic is unfortunately both thematically dull and mechanically overpowered.

Female witchers don't bother me at all — plenty of children die on the regular for the sake of witchers' existence as is. What I want most for the next Witcher game is a drastic change of scenery, anyway. Set it in Kovir, or Dol Blathanna, or Nilfgaard, or even Ofier or Zerrikania. Other than their names and heraldry, the Northern Kingdoms are pretty identical.

Though I know it will almost certainly never happen, those ronin figurines for Geralt and Ciri made me wish for a genuine Japan-themed RPG with the same basic premise as the Witcher series (lone monster hunter travels the land and faces an assortment of fairy tale creatures). It would be so easy to translate the format, since Japanese folklore has a veritable wealth of weird monsters to draw from.

I know. My point is that it should be. I liked some of the short stories, but got bored halfway through the novels. I don't think TW as a franchise offers anything particularly compelling beyond the folklore themed monster hunting.

It could, but if CDPR are going to be adding their own lore anyway, I'd still much rather they flesh out other parts of the world.

That doesn't seem necessary. The games have invented several new witcher schools already; they could just pull another one out of their sleeve and say they figured out how to make female witchers. Or they could set the games much further in the past and say there used to be female witchers, but people forgot them. Not terribly elegant, perhaps, but I don't think canon is so sacred that they cannot twist it a bit for convenience.

I seem to have expressed myself poorly. I was not suggesting they make a Japan-themed Witcher game. I was idly expressing a desire for an RPG in a Japanese setting, with a similar conceit to the Witcher's and in a style I'd like, by whatever willing developer. For the next Witcher's setting I already mentioned some pre-established options I think might be interesting. I happen to like the Slavic monsters, but I think the Northern Realms lack a strong cultural identity in much the same way as, say, Kirkwall in DA2. Take the witchers and monsters away and this could be any pseudo-medieval fantasy setting. 'Realistic' and brutal medieval climates have been all the rage since the 80s, at least.

Well, that's a taste matter. And I'd point out that we see sorcerers and witches, knights and even regular huntsmen all engage in monster hunting for various reasons throughout the setting, witchers haven't exactly monopolized the field, and you wouldn't have to be a witcher to travel and hunt monsters if that's the only thing that really matters to you.

Adding their own lore is one thing, going to places the books never covered in detail, going outside the culture of both the creators and the games' setting and trying to create equally authentic-seeming middle-eastern fantasy worlds from scratch seems like something of a gamble to me, especially when what they have already works so well. I'd much rather see another company without so much to lose try their hand at that if they think that there's a demand for it.

Yes, the games have invented schools, only two of which are somewhat functional and still taking recruits. The profession is supposed to be dying out due to human expansion and advancement.

When you're talking about making the games prequels, suddenly including the mass-murder of little girls to create mutants in the story and retconning canon lore all just to accommodate people's desire to play a female witcher then I'd frankly call that bastardizing the franchise and compromising the series in an attempt try to please everyone, and I don't see it leading to a better or more successful product in the long run.

I'd love an RPG in a Japanese setting too, by whatever willing developer. A Chinese, a middle-Eastern and a Scandinavian one as well. If the video game industry did nothing but churn out high-quality RPGs with various cultural influences then I'd be the happiest man on Earth. Obviously every culture has rich folklore to dig into that would make for unique and engaging worldbuilding if done with passion and attention to detail.

But I certainly don't find the Northern Realms lacking a strong cultural identity, and see a lot of the dryness, stoicism and matter-of-factness that I would say should characterize a Slavic culture with strong Germanic influences like Poland is, since that's what the Northern Realms are supposed to represent. And I don't see that CDProject Red is somehow at fault for sticking to their guns in that regard.

If you just find European medieval settings boring then that's you, but The Witcher and Game of Thrones have been huge mainstream cultural phenomena for the past ten years specifically for featuring unusually gritty and faithful and ruthless portrayals of it. Seems weird and snobbish to me that you're so eager to dismiss the genre and call it outdated, while arbitrarily favoring a culture that I would say has gotten its share of exposure too in the form of samurai and martial arts movies, books, anime, manga and games.

Rumor going around that The Witcher "4" will be a prequel starring Ciri.