Witcher 4!
 

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Ciri is now the main character.

No release date yet. Hopefully next year.

Actually a bit shocked as to how much blowback they're getting for Ciri being the new MC, although I suspect a large portion of that is incels stamping their feet and raging into the void.

For me, it's just not as immersive with Ciri as the PC. I can't relate to her at all and that's partially because she's female. I would prefer the ability to choose your protagonist if not a full blown character creator. But this is the Witcher so that's not going to happen.

I think it's safe to say that she won't be limited to just blipping around this time. I really found her limited playthroughs in 3 to be tedious.

And yeah, I'd rather it was Geralt again or a new male character, but sadly this is just the way things are now. I assume Geralt will still be in the story, albeit limited to the Vesemir role.

I mean, can we at least wait until the game is released before making that determination? Geralt has next to no relatability outside of wanting to find his surrogate daughter for most of Witcher 3. He's a nearly century old warrior wizard going around and ****ing any remotely attractive female companion and shaking down peasants by playing cards.

What does that mean? This ain't typical modern girl boss nonsense, Ciri has been set up to be the next player protagonist for almost a decade. Even if you get the ending where she's not a Witcher, she's pretty open with Geralt about not really finding it all that interesting and she's already thinking about doing something else.

Am I alone in always choosing the female model when there is a choice between male and female. I mean, if I’m going to stare at an ass for 30-100 hours, I’d like it to be a nice one.

Yeah, I can relate to that. LOL

I don't spend a lot of time looking at myself. I'm paying attention to whatever my character is looking at.

It's a role playing game. Role playing games have always been about, well...role playing.

I simply can't play as a female, it ruins the role playing aspect for me.

So you like can't play Tombraider?

I have never played Tomb Raider. No desire. But those are primarily action games, not RPGs.

https://media4.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2...HtO/giphy.webp

Replace boat with graphics card.

I'm generally the same way unless it doesn't matter like ARPG's. Also being Mic'd up with others breaks immersion for me and I've never understood wanting to be talking live to sweaty fools while playing a game.

Let's be honest here, Witcher was girl bossing before it was cool. There was never a time Yennifer or Triss or really any of the top level sorceresses couldn't have barbequed Geralt in a flash had they really wanted to. And Ciri is the most powerful character in the game. If this is like the other games, there's a romance angle here, and while I don't really care about playing a one off character as a female lesbian in Fallout or Starfield (agree with Chazno), this would be different because Ciri is an established character and playing her as a lesbian would just be.... off. Sort of like the odious series turning Dandelion bi was very off.

I'm sure as hell not romancing a dude to move a major storyline along.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard has entered the chat.

LMAO Well, got bad news for you then. Ciri is notoriously horny in the books. Like, weirdly so.

I've never read the books. I remember there was a dialogue option when she was in the sauna in Skellige saying she preferred women, but it never played out in the game itself.

Oh well. I can certainly think of worse things than a Ciri lesbo-romance. But again, there will never come a time when I whisper sweet nothings in Eskel's ear. :D

Oh no, it ain't lesbian.

Oh boy. I'm torn between asking and not wanting to know, but my twisted mind is already envisioning her getting tagteamed by a couple of werewolves. LMAO

IIRC she was seriously contemplating suicide because she was super horny for some warrior in his 30s that already had a wife and kids. She was a preteen.

There's some shit that's not making it into the games!

Books are goofy as **** to be fair. Outside of a few storylines that got botched in development I think Witcher 3 was far better at portraying those characters. Probably why the author is constantly ass hurt.

I hope the game has a decent scissoring mechanic. LOL

So...this is the new "game", not the Netflix show...OK. I'm not a gamer, like at all, but I do like the show.

I'll keep waiting for that.

You should play the games and dump the series. The show got so bad that Cavill quit.

Yip.

Game > show

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w3 was the best gaming experience i ever had so i will give w4 a shot even with the braindead decision to make ciri the protagonist.

The author is ass hurt because he's a fool that took a one time payment over royalties or percentage of merchandise. He either had such little faith in his work, or such little faith in CDPR he demanded a one time lump sum, only to see them turn Witcher 2 and 3 into a couple of the greatest adventure games ever made, and Witcher 3 is arguably the best game of its genre ever made.

Sapkjowski would be swimming in money if he wasn't a complete moron.


As for Ciri being the main, I can see both sides. Geralt is cool as **** and another Geralt adventure on next gen hardware, well, who wouldn't be pumped for that?

But the way that 3 ended in Blood and Wine, Geralt has it made. He's flush with coin, he has an entire vineyard at Corvo Bianco, complete with whichever companion you chose for him to end up with.

I think Ciri looked pretty badass in the trailer, she's not a kid anymore, she's older and more experienced.

As long as she can do all the signs, use the potions and stuff, and the gameplay is familiar to what I had in 3, improving where possible, it doesn't really matter to me which Witcher I'm playing as.

CDPR has a knack for telling great stories, and as long as they actually finish the ****ing game before they release it, I'm all in on this game.

Yeah, I really hope whoever needed to learn their lesson learned it after the Cyberpunk fiasco.

To their credit, they did refund the unfinished purchase. I remember being really pissed off when I got it on launch day. I just couldn't believe the same developer that gave us Witcher 3 was capable of such a disaster.

I'll eventually own Witcher 4, but CDPR will never again get my money sight unseen. After a few years, they finally got Cyberpunk straightened out. Hopefully the execs keep their noses out of this one, and let them finish the work.

I almost never buy games when they first come out and it's served me well. AC Unity was flawless for me, for example.

I'm not gonna paste the whole article because I'm on my phone and formatting is a mess but I was waiting for this:

CDPR Claims The Witcher 4 Will Tackle a Woman’s Struggle in a Medieval World

https://www.eurogamer.net/the-witche...evious-choices

What if we don't care about a woman's struggle in a video game? It's supposed to be escapism.

Yikes.

Witcher 3 had a small touch of it, with the female Blacksmith's assistant at The Bloody Baron's Crow Perch.

It turned out that the female assistant was literally a master, but to that point needed this bumbling clod to pose as the blacksmith in order to sell her wares, because a woman Blacksmith wouldn't be trusted by the fighting men to create armor their lives depended on.

Enter Geralt, going off on a fetch quest for tools and materials, and donning her armor to be tested against the bumbling blacksmiths armor against Nilfgardian crossbows.

Her armor proves superior of course, and she's recognized as a master, and the idiot serves as her assistant from then on.

That's about all I can remember of highlighting "Men good, woman inferior haw haw haw" in the hundred or so hours of that game I played.

I haven't looked, but I'd check to see if sweet baby Inc is involved with this game, they excel at cramming DEI shit into games.

I just read through the article quickly and maybe I missed it, but I didn't see anything over the top in that regard. There was one question and answer that touched on the subject, but I don't have any issues with it.



The question was more leading in that direction and the answer was fair in regards to the world of The Witcher.

It's not that it's egregious or anything. I just don't enjoy it.

I don't play RPGs to have the entire story dictated to me ostensibly because of the devs' choice of main character.

It's not about DEI for me. Baldurs Gate has plenty of DEI. It also has a shit ton of player agency. This just seems like CDPR doubling down on telling the story as strictly as possible, this making choice an illusion.

I mean, they're invalidating some of the possible outcomes of 3 to make Ciri the protagonist in 4. I guess for me it comes down to if I wanted to play this much story force fed to me, I'd just play the Last of Us.

The only ending they invalidated is the one where Geralt is a terrible father figure and Ciri pays the price for it.

It's still a choice that was invalidated.

Maybe the Witcher series just isn't for me anymore. I have to admit, it took me a while to finish the game. I wasn't all that interested in Geralt by the end. And I've never watched the shows. Like I said, if I wanted a strongly curated story, I'd watch TV. I play RPGs to carve a little escapist fantasy for myself.

Well, shit. I don't really know what to think about this, but I do know that I'll probably wait until I hear some positive feedback and not buy this one immediately sight unseen.

First off, never watch the show. The 5 alarm fire that is the Witcher series is textbook reason why you don't disrespect source material.

I'm sure we'll get the screech and squee from those who pound the drum for artistic license, but when your lead actor quits because this is not the character he agreed to play, you've ****ed up.

Second, a lot of games that have follow ups have this "invalidating of a choice", and lean toward their canon ending being the "best" or "good" ending.

The devs give you the opportunity to see how things would play out differently, which is cool, but you cant honestly expect a game like say, Mass Effect 3 to follow the same path where you elected to get your entire team and yourself killed during the suicide mission.


I'd argue that the well crafted story, as well as all of the side quest story threads are what make Witcher 3 so good.

I guess I've also really never regarded Witcher 3 as a true RPG though either. Geralt kind of is what he is. You can tinker with how you choose to defeat enemies, what fancy moves you can do, but in the end no real skill tree decisions that you spend points on change what Geralt is.

It isn't a situation where one playthrough can be vastly different from the previous one based on the character you've designed. Geralt is heavily pre-made with a few style options for the player based on light or heavy attacks, signs, or proficiency with alchemy.

Fallout is probably the best example I could use, where how you approach the game, decisions you make, and gameplay itself vary widely. One character I have has points put into sneaking, picking locks, hacking terminals, and relies heavily on VATS attacks with small arms like a pistol. Combat has to be approached with emphasis on stealth, and landing critical hits, because in a straight up fight they're squished.

Another one I have can't pass a single speech check, has the lowest amount of skill points due to an intelligence of 1, but is built like a brick shithouse and can wade into a Supermutant nest with a Super Sledge and lay waste to anything that moves.

Geralt on the other hand, he's always going to be this well rounded monster slayer, and decisions the player makes in skill trees is not going to really move the needle one way or another on what he can or cannot do in the game.

I'd like the agency to be able to to Ard Triss and Yennefer's annoying asses out into the ocean and abscond with Rosa Var Attra and her twin sister instead, but this just isn't that type of game.

Witcher 3 to me is more action fantasy hack and slash than true rpg.

Your last sentence says it all - it's really just an action game at its core.