This is not from fan-fiction:
- Dragonfly
- Adela

CDproject, are your investors aware of you plan to harm sales of Witcher 4, as Ubisoft did to Star Wars Outlaws? As EA did to Dragon Age: The Veilguard? Wanna join the club?

Seems Sapkowski's new Witcher novel (translated roughly "Crow's Crossing") follows Geralt as a teenager "... embarking on The Path for the very first time." (IGN)

While I'm not a big fan of returning (or is it pandering?) to a mainstay character's teenage years (ie Sherlock Holmes Chapter One) it makes sense in this case. I still remember the few (but powerful) scenes from the Polish tv series Wiedźmin.

And for a few in this thread...

... not wanting to play a Witcher game as a character other than Geralt isn't always some form of sexism.

Sometimes it's just someone wants to play a series as the main character they fell in love with -- like wanting to play as Lara Croft when you load up a new Tomb raider game. Yes, sometimes "new blood" can work, but moreso than not it's like loading up a new Tomb Raider and finding Lara introducing us to the new player character, Fred Croft... and no matter how cool we're told by publisher or devs Fred is, he ain't Lara. That just happens when you make a game (and series) around a singular character -- most fans want to continue playing as the character that built the series / franchise. If you want a successful series where you can change the main character, either make a series with a different protagonist in each installment or allow for a user-created main character (ie I just came off of two Dragon Age Inquisition playthroughs... one male and one female... same with Dragon's Dogma). Now, we all see how this worked out for the Netflix show. It tried to make the Witcher an ensemble that continued minimizing Geralt's importance and...

IMO now it makes sense why Doug Cockle seemingly was asked by CDPR to stop talking about his lack of input, contact, etc regarding Geralt in Witcher IV. Oh well...

Ciri in the trailer looks great. What are you afraid of? That she is more badass than you?
Are you a bit Wimpy? Don't worry - You will grow out if it when you are more mature.

Just joking. But really. I like the "new" Ciri. Can't wait to play the game...

Great to see, that new Witcher should continue in open world. Although W3 ended very well, new stories could expand known universe to more depth. Graphics seem very realistic after years of photo realistic graphics, now it seems more true, than ever.

I only afraid of two things. Firstly, that there would be some DRM pre-order bonus and secondly is that there would be influence of some modern trends how to highlight defects superiority (Sweet Baby Inc.).

Yet another proof that CDPR has lost its way. Those "messages" which you said all parts of the trailer represent is hardly what one would expect from a Witcher game. It was always a side thing and you made it the central part.
Making Ciri a new protagonist sound like a very interesting idea, as much as it might be difficult to implement due to the character's background and the lore liberties aside, I really do not understand your obsession with cacophilia!

Ugly doesn't mean better in ANY way. People are attracted to beauty since they are born. It's not a social construct, it is not ideological. A lot of research confirm this and obviously people tend to want products and characters displaying beauty. One of the examples of how this works: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2566458/
Of course, characters do not have to be pretty to be "attractive". An average person feels sympathy for even a monstrous Quasimodo and would probably like to play as this character in a game with no caveats, even though it is not a natural instinct to revel in the look.

However, if you already have an attractive character and you make it uglier on purpose, it is an unnatural and stupid decision. You did it with Cyberpunk and based on the trailer you have decided to do the same with Ciri. If she had had a different look since the beginning, fine. But it's not the case. Some people claim that those are just liberties made in the trailer, and yet you set a precedent with Cyberpunk. I'd like you to rethink your choices. People tend to invest themselves in characters are such changes will always cause protest and outrage. I am just extremely annoyed, because it is clearly an ideological choice based on wrong premises (the research confirms my argument).

I'd rather you finally focused on Slavic lore underrepresented in modern fantasy. You could do it with Witcher 1, but mostly shunned it with Witcher 3 for some reason, while it gives so many opportunities for attractive stories and characters an average person is not very familiar with these days. That should be your focus with Witcher 4 imo. Not some ideological statements that only divide and annoy. My tuppence.

That says a lot about your perspective... more than you may know.

So we've gone from "there's not enough representation" to "it's only representation if you don't enjoy looking at the representation." I'm sorry but this is a losing ticket in both the marketplace and the marketplace of ideas...

... and is IMHO the very reason there's so much pushback to what Witcher IV has shown so far.

You understand that the article you linked to is not about human faces, but domestic and wild cats?

---

There is actually very little pushback, from an obviously vocal but still tiny minority. The usual "anti-woke brigade", feeling their usual need to howl at everything with women in it with the hope that someone will notice them this time.

Yes, we know that there are a thousand ways to put an empowered woman. Nobody ever complained about Alien, Xena, Buffy, Wonder Woman and so on. Is it less credible? Sometimes yes. Do we like it? It's fantasy, of course we like it. Now. Seriously CDProjekt? Seriously right now when we're all fed up with the message?

Couldn't you wait for all this to pass, as hippies, emos, punks and every 'new' movement that failed?

And do you know why every social movement that thinks they have the real answer for every human question, failed? Because, until we will be robots (which still far), we still the same animals as 200.000 years ago, and accumulating an evolution of millions of years, since firsts sexual animals.

Don't became woke, it will age so bad, as any other sub-cultures with new ideas in the past.

The trailer looks cool. To me it was fully expected she would be the next protagonist.

However I¨m happy to end my Witcher-experience with W3, since to me Geralt = Witcher. Anything else would be like buying a Batman game and not play Batman. A huge reason for why I liked the Witcher games is because I thought Geralt was a really cool and likeable character.

Will the Ciri game character have the same depth or appeal?!

Modern Polish directors in games, TV, and film have a bad habit of making overly-edgy characters, that almost become caricature in nature, and not relatable or likeable to anyone not Polish or East European.

So will she be a Captain Marvel or an Ellen Ripley?!

haha this outraged big brain thread is hilarious :D

It's not canon either. One is from the Polish tv series, and the other is from a tabletop RPG based on that tv series. Now, I'm actually in the minority of Witcher fans in that I'm quite fond of that series, I think it had great music, for the most part fantastic cast, captured a lot of the mood very well and adapted some of the individual short stories relatively faithfully, but it also made huge departures from the books too, like including female Witchers, and overall how they depicted the Witcher organisation.

Depends what (or who) you mean by Batman, because I would absolutely love a good Batman Beyond game.

Does this thread count as a political thread by now?

Your inability to read aside (the first line of the abstract "Human infants, just a few days of age, are known to prefer attractive human faces.") even if the article didn't include that information, the point is very clear AAANNND nothing stops you from looking for more information on the topic. But you won't, right? That'd interfere with that confirmation bias.
And how many Polish productions have you been exposed to recently? Yet what I will admit is that modern Polish cinema is mostly rubbish, most actors are talentless and maisntream art is mostly dead. All of that because it has been taken over by ideologues and political fanatics who only support those who think the same even if the art is not political in any way, and there is a sense of Western complex as if they couldn't contribute on their own (maybe they can't, as they only support rabbits friends and relations, not good artists objectively). Cliques cannot produce good content. If you compare it all with what artists who tried to counter politics in the People's Rep. of Poland and focused on quality and message rather than self-interest and ideology-motivated sponsors, it is a shocking difference in quality.