Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

The Witcher The Witcher IV - The Ciri Saga Begins

cvv

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 30, 2013
Messages
19,063
Location
Kingdom of Bohemia
Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is.

So it was either character creation, or Ciri. CDPR made they choice and I'm willing to let them cook and get a taste before passing judgement.
Trouble is a lot of people are sick and tired of badass fehmail badasses even now, including a growing chunk of normies. If this trend continues (which it will) then by the time the game comes out absolutely everyone will be fresh out of good will for any female protagonist game, no matter how good or ungood.

The game will never be a Concord-grade flop and probably not even another Veilguard. But while TW3 sold five million in the first month and 50 million lifetime, TW4 is gonna sell 3 million the first month and 15 million lifetime. That's my ballpark guess.
 
Joined
Dec 31, 2011
Messages
915
Wasteland 2
[...]
So, again, Ciri becoming a witcher is unfaithful to the books as written. There is simply no going around that.

And suddenly there is a whole new SECRET school dedicated training of female witchers NOBODY ever knew about? It's like making the Warrior from Diablo I into the son of the king in Diablo III, because technically nobody really said that he couldn't be the one. Except it doesn't make sense with how the villagers act towards the player's chosen class, and how the Warrior himself adresses the defeated king Leoric ("Rest well, Leoric. I will find your son").
Your quotes actually state that:
1) It could be attempted.
2) The concotions they had contained male hormones and would turn her into tranny.
3) Yennefer wouldn't let it happen.

So:
1) It could be attempted.
2) Someone could develop female hormones based version.
3) Ciri could do it to herself and her elder blood, or her magic could help her survive it as an adult.
and...
4) Sapkowski himself doesn't give a shit about his lore and would make shit up deus ex machina style whenever it suited him, so making above shit up to suit the gameplay is no worse than the shlock Sapkowski was comming with all the time.

It's not like they'll have female witchers NPCs, Ciri is a special case and it's fine. The real question is if the current year CDPR can still write decent stories, or finally can design decent gameplay.
Doubt on both, but Ciri as a witcher for a story driven continuation is fine. If they fail, they should utilize codebase and assets for a gameplay and sidequest driven prequel spinoff with character creation of male witchers from different schools.
 

DannyRope

Literate
Joined
Oct 29, 2024
Messages
26
I'm sure they'd like to maul him to death with a golf club at some point also but probably they won't dare... tho he might get pitchforked for the second time and Ciri could go on a revenge mission :lol:

If a future trailer features Geralt talking to Ciri in several scenes then I might suspect those scenes being half fake and Geralt getting Neil Druckmann'd.
 

markec

Twitterbot
Patron
Joined
Jan 15, 2010
Messages
51,429
Location
Croatia
Codex 2012 Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Dead State Project: Eternity Codex USB, 2014 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath

But why change something that works, I just keep thinking about the next 3 Witcher games as Ciri as the main character and it bothers me on certain levels and Im not incel or sexist
In a more superficial way it bothers people because the Witcher story is a mans story. A story of a man who does what needs to be done, risking his life in a hard, dirty work that will get him little gratitude but he still does it without hesitation. While he finds some comfort in drinking with buddies and embrace of a women. This is not a tale made for a woman, which makes it feel forced and out of place.

On a deeper level its bothering because its a betrayal of both Ciri and Geralt as a characters.

Witcher 3 is a story of father who is helping his daughter to grow up and accept her responsibilities not to others but to herself, to accept her destiny. True ending of Witcher 3 is Ciri becoming the Empress, because it is her destiny. Becoming a monster hunter means squandering her potential and abandoning her destiny for a safe choice. Its safe to do what you know and what you are good at while surrounded by people who care about you and support you. While it is hard to abandon forever all that and walk into unknown.

Geralt loves Ciri as a daughter, he wants to help her and protect her. He knows that if she takes a path of becoming a Empress its a different path then his and he probably will never see her again. To protect her from the difficult path it would be easy for him to tell her to stay by his side and become a monster hunter but he knows that there is not where her path lies. He knows that she needs to embrace her destiny and to accomplish that she needs to leave him and walk her own path. Because no matter how much she loves being a monster hunter, or him, or other people around her, if she abandons her destiny no matter how much support she gets from those people or how rewarding that job is, there will always be feeling of regret deep inside her. Every time she lies down on a stormy night, in a mud below a tree to sleep, whole body bruised, she will wonder what could have been.

At the same time Geralt would feel as he failed Ciri to properly guide her, although he would not show it and would be supporting of her choice after she made her mind. But I doubt that he would have many peaceful nights in his retirement farm, sitting on the edge of a bed thinking where is she now and where did he go wrong.

Ive seen so many comments on twitter of people praising the idea of Ciri becoming a Witcher, calling that ending of Witcher 3 a perfect ending. To me its a bitter sweet ending at best, a tragedy at worst.

To go from a Empress that could shape a history of the world, create your own dynasty, to be a legend that in thousands years people will talk about you. To abandon that potential to be a lone wanderer hunting down monsters in some backward village is a tragedy in my book.
 

MasPingon

Arcane
Joined
May 13, 2007
Messages
1,930
Location
Castle Rock
Coming back to Ciri more broadly, there was a sense with The Witcher 3, and I think a lot of Witcher fiction as a whole - the TV series as well as the books - that this is a man's world, and that the experience of a woman is actively quite a significant theme in The Witcher in a lot of different forms. The women of this world are subjected to a lot of violence, they're heavily sexualized in different ways. There's the kind of 'deal with the devil' that sorceresses have to have to make where they lose their fertility and so on. Watching the trailer, it seemed to maybe channel this: there's Ciri, a woman trying and failing to save another woman from more of this universe's violence, right? Is that an intentional theme that you were channeling with the trailer? And also, is it something you're intentionally looking to explore in the game, the experience of a woman in particular through Ciri's eyes in this world?
I really can't understand how can they answer this kind of question with a streight face. Geralt is a man stripped of his humanity by a "system", he is cast out of society, deprived of his ability to concieve a child and have a family. His destiny was decided by someone else, he is struggling to have a will to live the life of a Witcher, trying to make sense out of it. He is a leftover, abondened by his mother, subjected to enormous experiments which made him a monster in eyes of common folks. He's doing his shit job with dignity, even though he is despised by many. We observe the world through his eyes in the Saga.

Imgine you've read the books and all you got out of it is that it's a man's world where woman have a hard time. I hate this kind of tribal thinking with passion.
 

ga♥

Arcane
Vatnik
Joined
Feb 3, 2017
Messages
8,135
It sounds as awkward to read as some of the stuff George R.R Martin and Stephen King put out there. Kind of sad, really - I used to be an avid reader but even as a kid a lot of stuff in fantasy novels made me raise an eyebrow and I turned to video games instead. Now they're also being less than subtle in regards to the weird kinks of the writers. :|

As discussed in various other threads, I think there's a very arguable theory that nerds in general stopped reading as they age, because the publishing houses and various apparatuses of adult lit have been throughly colonized by shit, like all media.

When you look at older stuff, there's so much quality available. Then you look at new fantasy/sci-fi and it's all reminiscent of modern Hugo Award winners.
The only modern fantasy novels I've read are from Andrzej Sapkowski, Witold Jabłoński, George R. R. Martin and Scott R. R. Bakker (why do so many authors steal Tolkien's R. R.?) and while none of them conceals his fetishes, they still deliver better writing that 90% of the fantasy writers of old, save for Tolkien, Zelazny, Howard and several others. I think I can live with a few kinks if it gets me good reading.
Try Malazan Book of the Fallen.
The Malazan series contains many themes around socio-economic inequality and social injustice throughout such as gender equality with Erikson stating "It occurred to us that it would create a culture without gender bias so there would be no gender-based hierarchies of power. It became a world without sexism and that was very interesting to explore.


fz5vzQi.png
 

Elttharion

Learned
Joined
Jan 10, 2023
Messages
3,099
Some reddit autist compiled a bunch of tweets and posts from a lore-master, lore and franchise designer:



TLDW he is an ex-The gamer and other journo outlets writer who shilled for the Netflix show and makes that Obsidian dude sound sane. He is part of the supposedly based CDPR polish A team btw.
 

Lord_Potato

Arcane
Glory to Ukraine
Joined
Nov 24, 2017
Messages
11,000
Location
Free City of Warsaw
Try Malazan Book of the Fallen.
Oh, that reminds me. I've read Erikson's Malazan novels. Managed to complete 5 books I think, got bored by the sixth. His writing for me is below the quality of Martin's and Bakker's and while I like his storytelling, especially descriptions of battles, I feel like the story got too big for a writer of his talent and it contains too many overpowered characters. Still have his novels in my home libray, until book 7 I think. Maybe one day I'll return to him, but now I want to reread Robert Howard and more of Karl Wagner.
 

ga♥

Arcane
Vatnik
Joined
Feb 3, 2017
Messages
8,135
Try Malazan Book of the Fallen.
Oh, that reminds me. I've read Erikson's Malazan novels. Managed to complete 5 books I think, got bored by the sixth. His writing for me is below the quality of Martin's and Bakker's and while I like his storytelling, especially descriptions of battles, I feel like the story got too big for a writer of his talent and it contains too many overpowered characters. Still have his novels in my home libray, until book 7 I think. Maybe one day I'll return to him, but now I want to reread Robert Howard and more of Karl Wagner.

What "writer of old" is worse than GRR Martin? Even Terry Brooks is better than him
 

Lord_Potato

Arcane
Glory to Ukraine
Joined
Nov 24, 2017
Messages
11,000
Location
Free City of Warsaw
Oh, that reminds me. I've read Erikson's Malazan novels. Managed to complete 5 books I think, got bored by the sixth. His writing for me is below the quality of Martin's and Bakker's and while I like his storytelling, especially descriptions of battles, I feel like the story got too big for a writer of his talent and it contains too many overpowered characters. Still have his novels in my home libray, until book 7 I think. Maybe one day I'll return to him, but now I want to reread Robert Howard and more of Karl Wagner.

What "writer of old" is worse than GRR Martin? Even Terry Brooks is better than him
Terry Brooks is literally garbage tier writer and a shameless Tolkien copycat, fuck him.

IMO Martin's writing is simply superior to that of Tad Williams, Glen Cook, Michael Moorcook, Robin Hobb (althrough sje has her moments), David Gemmell, Robert Jordan, Marrion Zimmer Bradley, and even Guy Gavriel Kay.

I most likely cannot remember the other half of fantasy writers I read during high school and university and whom I also consider worse than GRRM.
 

dukeofwoodberry

Educated
Joined
Nov 21, 2021
Messages
520
" Both Mitręga and Kalemba acknowledged a potential backlash from some corners of the internet at Ciri’s role as protagonist in The Witcher 4, but both insisted Ciri was always going to be the game’s main character."
Bullshit. Geralt was the series main character (he is THE literal Witcher). Ciri becoming a Witcher is simply what they try to fall back on to keep the series going, regardless of how unfaithful to the books it is.
I'd say if they weren't comfortable with a player-generated Witcher, Ciri does seem a natural choice.

Even though the main 5 novel series is called "Saga of the Witcher" Ciri becomes more and more significant from book to book.

Book 4, "Tower of the Swallow" basically belongs to her, she gets much more screentime and gets to do more significant shit than Geralt and his party of misfits. In book 5, "Lady of the Lake" they get a similar amount of space, but while Geralt mostly fucks around (literally) in Toussaint, until he receives a critical tip that allows him to move towards the 'endgame', Ciri travels between worlds, unveils many secrets of the multiverse (including the mystery of the Wild Hunt) and rapidly levels up for the final battle. During which they both get to kill an important baddie. Actually, Ciri kills her nemesis all by herself, while Geralt succeeds only with the help of Yennefer and Regis.

She's of course absent from CDPR Witcher 1 & 2 and only plays a supporting role in Witcher 3, but at the end of the second Expansion, it was evident that Geralt's only hoping for a retirement. I didn't want to play him in Witcher 4 and feel like the sentiment was shared by many fans. Forcing Geralt to go on another adventure once he managed to find solace in Corvo Bianco, preferably with his love interest, would be too cruel.

So it was either character creation, or Ciri. CDPR made their choice and I'm willing to let them cook and get a taste before passing judgement.
You're an absolute retard lol. Ciri makes no sense as a Witcher. You sound like a big fag too posting stuff about let CDPR cook
 

Skinwalker

*meows at 3AM for no reason*
Patron
Village Idiot
Joined
Aug 20, 2021
Messages
13,049
Location
Yessex
90% of the witcher 4 posts I see on twitter are from almost naked cosplay thots dressed as twitcher 3 Ciri
This is false and you can't prove it with evidence.
 

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom