The Witcher doesn’t have to be Assassin’s Creed – please don’t burn Geralt, CD Projekt!

The Witcher doesn't have to be Assassin's Creed – please don't burn Geralt, CD Projekt!

That’s one word: CD Projekt plans to deliver an entire new Witcher trilogy within just 6 years. Makes three years per sequel, where you needed a whopping four years for the first trilogy. However, the result was three games that differed greatly in terms of rules and structure. The announcement that parts four, five and six will now be delivered on Unreal Engine 5 seems ambitious, but feasible for the time being, but I don’t really like it (yet).

Of course, that doesn’t mean at all that it wouldn’t be a wise decision to streamline your processes accordingly, that you’re approaching the next iteration of the formative RPG series with a new certainty and pace. Still, it kind of worries me because, for better or for worse, Witcher never felt like a series to set the clock by. The self-imposed new regularity smacks of a move by a studio more aware of its fluctuating share price. The Witcher was such an organic, improbable thing.


We’ve come a long way since 2007. Would the journey have been just as nice as a pre-planned trilogy with a common technological and systemic basis?

I realize that this is a very subjective feeling. But when I hear about fully planned trilogies, I have in mind games that primarily swap stories and scenarios from one to the next. Especially with games of this size, three years is not necessarily comfortable if you have bigger gaming ambitions. Rather, there is shallow iteration of the existing mechanical base. Again, there are many good reasons to do this that aren’t just related to the business and logistical side of making games. But this model and the certainty that comes with it, in my eyes, lacks a bit of the romance of the controlled creative chaos that you could unleash when you started out as a Polish indie sensation.

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After four years, each new Witcher was also an event and a guesswork about how the new part would feel. God, how excited were we when the first pictures of the next part appeared on the net, because somehow The Witcher 2 and 3 seemed capable of anything beforehand. That stimulated the imagination and anticipation of what to expect. Planning a trilogy with a solid and quite brisk cadence from the start, most of the excitement and hype leading up to The Witcher 4 will fall into place. Because that immediately sets the framework for what is playfully in it for the successors. After all, they can’t afford to try too many new things in three years. Do we really want to see The Witcher as that typical type of series?


Even from the second to the third part, the Witcher changed his face massively.

Maybe I’ve just become too pessimistic in my old age, but this progressive block busting and the transformation of a series that started as an insider tip into a polished mass product annoys my disguised hipster soul. But I wish for the unpredictability of simpler days, when I only had a vague idea beforehand of what to expect. In which a new Witcher was an event because it didn’t appear as a matter of course on the calendar.

Of course, this is all more of a minor concern than a real criticism of CD Projekt. As for games defined a priori as a trilogy, I guess I’m just a little burned out. These developers still have all the cards in their hands to knock me out of my feet so much with the first title, which has certainly been in the works for a while, that I wake my fingers after every meter of land that you still have before spreads to me. And of course, those concerns don’t take into account the considerable talent of the resident writers at writing a story that I just want to keep following.

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And what does that mean for extended life through fantastic expansions like Blood and Wine. Will such content then be integrated directly into the successor? Am I worrying too much?

At a certain point, as a company, you simply become too big to continue to take chances. CD Projekt had this painful experience with Cyberpunk 2077. It’s good that they’ve obviously thought about how to counteract this. If that works out in the end, the sensibilities of a mid-40s game editor are of secondary importance.



Reference-www.eurogamer.de