168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Witcher 4 has just been announced, and gamers everywhere can rejoice. Of course, CD Projekt Red isn’t calling it 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Witcher 4 yet, but none of us are going to call it A New Saga In The Witcher Story Made In Partnership With Epic But Not Exclusive To The ♏Epic Games Store. We might settle for The Next Witcher, but everyone is going to refer to it in passing as The Witcher 4. But then, is it The Witcher 4? It feels odd that CDPR has avoided number denotation, especially given that both sequels so far have been known as 2 and 3, albeit with subtitles to them. There are three reasons I can think of for why it’s not just called The Witcher 4, so let’s take a look at them all here.
The first one is just to keep it a mystery - this is the one everyone is pushing as most likely (hence why they’re all calling it The Witcher 4 anyway), but I think there’s more to it than just the mystique. That doesn’t seem like CDPR’s style. It has always been a highly communicative company, sometimes to a fault as the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Cyberpunk 2077 hype campaign showed, but this is a bit of a nothingburger announcement. It confirms the game is being worked on, which we all knew, and tells us that it’s on Unreal 5 rather than REDengine, something that’s a major own goal for CDPR and something only those with an acute interest in the industry care about. This could have gotten major buzz had it been revealed in a showcase or event, yet it’s a wall of text quietly publish🙈ed to its own website and dispersed through social media. It doesn’t feel like CDPR’s style to just not tell us for the sake of it, so I suspect there is significantly more to it.
Perhaps CDPR has learned from Cyberpunk, of course, but even then I don’t think drip-feeding info just to obfuscate fans is a CDPR move. If anything, since Cyberpunk the edgy-corporate ‘this company is our friend!’ angle has been ditched for more human emotion, perhaps 💫as a reaction to the toxic hate cycle CDPR found itself at the centre of after revving its fans up with jokes about customisable vaginas in FIFA 78. We’ve seen more livestreams, m꧟ore conversations with developers, and less tweets with mega cool swear words in them.
You’ll never go broke betting on mystery, because there’s always some semblance of truth to it, but I think there’s more afoot. This is where the theory splits, because Theory A: it is The Witcher 4, and Theory B: it isn’t The Witcher 4. Let’s start wit🍃h Theory A.
The Witcher has always followed up its numerical denotation with a subtitle, and that’s become an even bigger trend in gaming recently. Horizon Forbidden West doesn’t give much away about the game beyond the fact that you head westwards. God of War Ragna♚rok, however, reveals a majoꦏr plot event that will underpin the entire game. With so many novels to draw from, any given subtitle for The Witcher 4 would have led to speculation on the game, and it’s obvious CDPR wants to avoid too much speculation right now, hence why we’ve got nothing to go on.
I don’t think we’ll be playing as Geralt🌌 in the next game, I think we’ll be Ciri, and I’m unsure how the fanbase will react to that. Ciri is an incredibly popular character, but then FemShep always seems to be the most popular Shepard - yet is outnumbered two to one when it comes to player statistics. It could be that CDPR has little to show of the game yet, and doesn’t want to reveal that we’re playing as Ciri before tﷺhey can show us what that looks like. We might have had a taste of it, but for her to lead a game, following on from a character as revered as Geralt, no less, comes with a lot of pressure.
But ♉then, it could have just been The Witcher 4: Subtitle Added Later. This brings me to Theory B, which is probably the least popular, but in my mind at least, fairly likely - it’s not The Witcher 4 at all. CDPR is calling this A New Saga and showing a Cat medallion, which suggests it’s Ciri; by moving on from Geralt, it would bꦅe ‘a new saga’, and Ciri uses the Cat medallion. There’s just one issue - that doesn’t look like the Cat medallion.
The medallion we see in the game has flat ears, spread wide. The medallion in the snow has tall ears, pricked upward. They look enough like cat ears (if a little thin) and cats are known for their dexterity in moving their ears upwards, but if the medallion is proof positive that the next gam🐬e is about Ciri, doesn’t that fall apart when you realise it’s not Ciri’s medallion? It could still be a cat, and representative of the one Ciri wears, but it’s an odd choice to tease Ciri by giving us no subtitle, no reference to Ciri, and by making the medallion differe𝕴nt. We all think it’s Ciri because we’ve all thought the next game would be Ciri since we rolled credits seven years ago. Right now, we’re making the evidence fit instead of looking at what evidence is there.
Instead, the image suggests we’ll be getting a completely new timeline - a new saga, not a continuation of the current saga with a supporting character now 🎉in the lead role. It could be a prequel, way in the past when Witchers were much more common, or could be set in the future, away from the books entirely, looking at Witchers in a different landscape. I’m not necessarily saying abandoning the current massive scope of world building, rich characters, and untold stories is the best option, but using the evidence presented in the light tease, I do think it’s the most likely outcome.
