CD Projekt unceremoniously announced this week that it will be three – no, four – no, five?-new Witcher games in development, alongside a Cyberpunk 2077 sequel. Big Geralt is back.
Or at least, witches it is. We don’t know if any of CD Projekt’s planned games will star or guest star Geralt or Rivia, though the company has said the next big RPG won’t be Geralt’s story. We now know that game, which we call for the time being The Witcher 4, will be the start of “a new triple-A RPG trilogy.” CD Projekt codenamed that game Polaris. Will it star Ciri or an entirely new cast of characters? We do not know.
It seems more likely that Geralt will appear in one of the planned spin-offs that CD Projekt referenced this week by codenames: there’s Canis Majoris, a “full-fledged Witcher game, separate from the new Witcher saga starting with Polaris,” and also Sirius, a Witcher game from former indie studio Molasses Flood that will feature multiplayer in some way.
These aren’t the only rumbles in the Witcherverse. Season three of the Netflix Witcher series is set to release next year, and the prequel spin-off The Witcher: Blood Origin, starring Michelle Yeoh, will debut in December 2022. Netflix has said there will be another anime film and a “family-friendly” animated series on the way too.
That’s a lot of Witcher. But is it too much Witcher? Is CD Projekt just to appease investors, or is it finally giving the series the attention it deserves? Our team is divided between skepticism and excitement, so we battled it out.
Can CD Projekt really release three RPGs in six years?
Wes Fenlon, Editor-in-Chief: If you think CD Projekt is actually going to manage three new RPGs over a six-year period, then I have a bridge in Novigrad to sell you. 10 years sounds much more realistic. Six years (!?) seems like an impossible schedule for a studio that had to postpone The Witcher 3 twice and Cyberpunk 2077 three times. And not just because those games take years to develop: CD Projekt also has a long history of supporting its games post-launch, with months of patches and updates polishing them up. Cyberpunk desperately needed that time to feel like a finished game, but in the case of The Witcher 3, CD Projekt just made a great game better – yet that vital post-release time seems unrealistic when two sequels have to be done in six years. On the plus side, since I’m assuming each sequel takes a year or two longer than expected, I’m less worried about Witcher games burning up than I would otherwise be.
Lauren Aitken, guides editor: Three games delivered over a period of six years is absolutely doable! After the first game is released, it can wait three or four years for the next one before the final chapter arrives two years later. It’s ambitious and CDPR has certainly done a 180 of the “we’re never going to give final timescales again!” atmosphere since Cyberpunk 2077 came out. It makes me think that these games will be smaller in scope and much further along in production than claimed. Or they build it as one big game that, when it’s almost done, divide them into three games and fire out a trilogy. Blood and Wine and Hearts of Stone added an additional 30-40 hours to Witcher 3, and both came out within a year of Witcher 3’s release, so the expectation that it could work has already been established.
A trilogy released in a short time worked with Mass Effect, so it may work here! At least put it in my veins.
Will back-to-back-to-back Witcher RPGs feel the same?
wes: This is the greater concern for me. I’ve played all three Witcher RPGs and enjoyed them all, but they each have a very strong, very different identity. If CD Projekt makes three more in quick succession, I imagine the necessary asset reuse and design learning will make them much more similar. Maybe the developers will eventually overcome that through the sheer quality of the writing and the design of the quest – that would be great. But assuming they’re all open-world RPGs that follow the same characters – which seems likely if they’re planning a separate trilogy – I’m having a hard time imagining they’re as different as the first three Witchers, or something like that. improve dramatically between games.
Announcing three games from the jump just seems like a business decision to me, not one driven by game developers with so many plans and ambitions that a single game just wouldn’t make it. But hey, if they’re aiming to make something like the Mass Effect trilogy with story decisions carried over between games, I’m curious to see how it goes.
Laurens: There’s a lot more going on than just a trilogy! Project Sirius is being made by The Molasses Flood, so will be a separate development for the in-house Witcher team. Looking at their previous games (The Flame in the Flood, Drake Hollow) it will probably be different from all the Witcher games out there now, including Gwent and standalone and spin-offs like Thronebreaker.
Canis Majoris is also being developed by a separate team – an outside studio founded by Witcher veterans. It’s unclear if that’s a subsidiary of CDPR or an unnamed team – they could even be part of the new Boston team (although it appears that studio will focus on Cyberpunk 2077 and its sequel Project Orion Orion) . I think the trilogy will be the most recognizable – I hate to say the same – and Canis Majoris has the potential to feel very Geralt-y when led by a team that worked on The Witcher 3’s design and quests. . Maybe Canis Majoris will be the Ciri game instead of an entire trilogy about her, or maybe it’s the Dandelion RPG that Fraser would love to play.
If the trilogy focuses on a new school, which the Lynx medallion strongly suggests, then there must be a new way to recruit Witchers, and maybe a new way to mutate them (could Keira & Lambert have something to do with that? ?). This would put it in a “modern” direction of sorcery and alchemy as the two, in addition to possibly Ciri, Geralt and co. could come up with new methods of hunting monsters with new Witchers. Or maybe they are moving away from monsters on this planet and can traverse time and space using portals? You also have to wonder which of these games, if any, will be based on the canon ‘Ciri becoming a Witcher’ ending. Or will we look further into new threats in the future? Who else lurks in the shadows for us to reckon with, even scarier vampires than Detlaffe or the Unseen Elder? Use your imagination, Wes!
wes: I’m trying. I’m trying! Um… The Witcher: Time Bandits?
Can we see too much of the Northern Realms between games and TV?
wes: As much as I love The Witcher 3, I think the media over the years in general has really soured me with too much of a good thing. I lived and breathed Star Wars into my teens and even into my twenties, and I’ve seen almost everything from the MCU too, but I’m feeling the fatigue for both these days. They actually made a movie about young Han Solo and I watched him like a sucker. I don’t want to play a game starring young Geralt or Daddy Vesemir, or watch a Netflix spin-off about Dandelion. I love these characters! But I partly like that I don’t know everything about them.
What I like most about The Witcher 3 is how Geralt crosses paths with another Witcher or an old acquaintance in certain quests; CD Projekt did a brilliant job of writing dialogues that outlined their relationships and history without info-dumping their life stories. It made the world bigger and more real, and reinforced how many adventures Geralt had experienced. You lose something when each of those characters has its own origin story and every piece of media is connected together, Marvel-style, and start prioritizing building the shared universe over making the individual pieces great.
Perhaps that will never happen with The Witcher – since CD Projekt and Netflix each do their own thing, it’s not really an MCU situation. But a new trilogy and more spin-off games all being developed at the same time is enough to make me nervous. And tired.
Laurens: However, there is so much of the world outside the big cities that needs to be explored! Visiting Aretuza in-game would be great, as would exploring Mahakam, Lyria, and Rivia, but further afield than we’ve been able to do so far. You can visit these areas briefly in Thronebreaker, but it’s not the same as full world-building. Witcher’s are not just limited to the northern realms or Novigrad and it’s time to move on.
I’d love to see more Witchers in one place and not just a symbolic quest where they all get drunk in a fortress – that’s definitely one of my favorite Witcher 3 missions, but it was great to see them team up in the wild too . I’d like to see CD Projekt put a slightly heavier focus on the sorceresses, and definitely more elves, as their storyline from The Witcher 2 was used in The Witcher 3. And I want to play more of the cool stories from the books with golden dragons. But that’s because I’m a big nerd.
I’m equally hesitant about letting the Witcher become a little MCU. But honestly, I enjoy the Witcher universe outside of the games so much that I’m not really concerned about it. It feels risky to say so many Witcher projects are being developed at the same time, alongside a CP2077 sequel and more. I get it though – CD Projekt is looking for more investment, wanting to give fans a bit of mystery and hype and proving that despite CP2077’s “failure” at launch, it’s committed to making games. Pushing forward with a brand new studio in Boston is proof of that. It’s another exciting time for CDPR. But watch out for new games right now – where’s that Witcher 3 next-gen update?
wes: As careful as I am about stuffing the Witcher world with side stories and origins, if they give me a Final Fantasy Tactics-style turn-based strategy game, I’ll be right there. If you can turn Metal Slug into a tactics game, it will definitely work for Geralt!
0 Comments