kind of, it’s more like it starts a geralt’s story, but becomes ciri’s story. the first two books are all geralt. after that it’s about geralt and ciri’s relationship. then by the last book we barely even see geralt.
then after the series was finished he started writing more little stories from earlier in geralt’s life.
as i said in another comment. it’s downright bizarre that ciri doesn’t get mentioned until the third game. she almost makes more sense as the protag anyway.
Came here to say this. Anyone that’s played Witcher 3 should have already known that Ciri was going to be the protagonist in the next game. I can’t wait. Ciri is badass.
Yeah, there were a couple of tiny decisions, any of which failed you out if you got them wrong, and several of them had deceptive descriptions during the QTE.
anyone who has read the books was likely surprised that ciri wasn’t the main character of any of the games when they first started coming out :::especially since geralt dies at the end of the books :::
ciri was more the mc than geralt for most of the books. she’s the child of destiny. she’s the young character that grows up as we follow their journey. she’s the one that finds herself and shows major character development throughout the books. the only character development geralt goes through is accepting his bond with ciri.
the first two games never mentioning ciri was outright bizarre tbh. only even remotely possibly because geralt lost his memory. like, with where geralt as at by the end of the books the only thing you could possibly expect him to do on regaining his memory is frantically search for signs of his adopted daughter
to a longtime book reader my reaction to ciri being the protag of the next game was “FINALLY”
my only curiosity at this point is how much she’ll be like book ciri. does she know magic? in the books ciri goes to sorceress school and then gets trained in primal magic by unicorns and immortal space elves. can you fuck a horse? that was one of the more… questionable scenes in the book.
tangent: sapkowski’s politics occasionally bleed through in weird ways in the books. like three’s a scene where a woman finds out she’s pregnant mid way through a literal war that our band wades through on their journey to save the world. the party basically needs the woman to proceed. she does not want the child. i believe it was the product of rape. yet for some reason geralt and a literal fucking vampire convince her that abortion is wrong and she should keep it instead of drinking a potion about it. it was so randomly out of character for everyone involved. but hey, that’s catholics for you i guess… /tangent
i think they generally said that ciri lost her elder blood powers after the king of the hunt was killed right? otherwise I’m gonna be really curious how handle that as well. she should be sort of the world’s greatest sorceress otherwise. ooh, i wonder if she’ll make quips about cyberpunk and/or other worlds she’s traveled to. like, she spent Decent bit of time in Arthurian legend. she shows up briefly in Victorian London.
also, what will the world at large look like? they can’t do it like the last time where your previous save could alter the new game based on your decisions. you were simply able to do too much. they’d need to make like 3 entirely separate stories at the very least. like, who rules the north? are you the empress of nilfguard? is the church burning all the nonhumans at record pace? you can basically decide the entire fate of the northern realms and all of its people in multiple ways… unless it just takes place elsewhere. maybe we’ll be in zerrikania this time or some shit. there are many distant lands that the games never take us. it would be much more doable that way. then you’d just have to change dialogue and maybe swap out a few characters.
aaaanyway… yeah, anyone mad about her being the mc is a dumbass that doesn’t know shit about the story.
I was under the impression that it wasn’t Victorian London, but The Plague Year. IIRC she, canonically, brings a blanket infested with plague lice from here to there, and ends up dropping it next to the ship Catriona, which is how the Catriona plague actually gets started. It was one of those “oh shit, yes, that explains everything” moments for me when I first read the books.
She does also extremely briefly travel to Edwardian or Victorian London (I forget exactly what year it was). It’s mostly depicted through a newspaper clipping from The Sun and a rebuttle from another newspaper calling out their quoted witness for trespassing and strongly implying he was inebriated at the time and being an unreliable source. It’s quite comically written really
no, but she kind of wanted to… but it’s also way more fucked than that. please don’t make me type it out here. I’ll just say it involves violent rape while she’s still under age. it could be construed as a trauma response, but it’s debatable… I’m not convinced that sapkowski would have known what a trauma response was when he wrote that scene in the… 90s?
can’t actuality remember which book that happened in.
By thedirtyknapkin@lemmy.world’s description I know what scene they’re talking about. It’s not great but it’s not as bad as they make out. Basically she ends up traveling for a bit with this really smarmy dude. Think incel used car salesman. He’s described as having greasy hair, he’s clearly not trustworthy and acts only in his own best interest, and is constantly trying to get into Ciri’s pants. But, he’s riding this incredible horse the likes of which Ciri has never seen before (and it turns out to in fact be a magical horse) and Ciri is just entranced by this incredible and majestic horse, and smarmy dude can tell, so he makes sure to use the horse to get Ciri to interact with him even though they both know she wants nothing to do with him and only gives him the light of day to see his horse.
Anyways smarmy dude and Ciri end up running from some bandits, smarmy dude is injured but plays down how badly, and basically uses this plus gifting her the horse she’s so entranced by to manipulate and guilt her into agreeing to sleep with him (from her perspective it’s been made clear how curious but nervous she is about sex, so she’s not entirely opposed, but it’s also implied up to this point that she’s far more into women than men) and then just as she’s starting to potentially enjoy the pity sex with the asshole but before either of them can actually get their pants off, he fucking dies!
can you fuck a horse? that was one of the more… questionable scenes in the book.
Uhhh which book is that? If it’s the section I’m thinking of with Kelpie the horse, she’s entranced by its beauty and it’s rider/owner tries to use that to get into her pants (and ultimately died before he was successful) but I don’t believe she ever expressed sexual attraction at all to it by my memory from reading the books a couple of months ago.
the party basically needs the woman to proceed. she does not want the child. i believe it was the product of rape. yet for some reason geralt and a literal fucking vampire convince her that abortion is wrong and she should keep it instead of drinking a potion about it
The party is trying to find Ciri after her disappearance. Geralt and Cahir are having visions indicating that she’s presently in great danger and suffering (and at that she was!). Finding out while practically at the front lines of the great war that their incredible archer, Milva is pregnant completely derails their entire journey because she can’t ride, shouldn’t travel, and will need to rest in a safe area for a while (which they are at this point constantly far from anywhere safe), plus they can’t exactly bring a baby onto the battlefield they’re actively crossing. It’s one moral quandry wrapped in another. Ultimately Geralt and Cahir leave it to Milva’s decision, as does Regis the barber-surgeon/vampire who created the abortion potion.
Also it wasn’t rape. While guiding a group of elves to safety, they hid in a thicket for a night with Nilfgaurdians surrounding them and searching for them. The elves decided that since they were likely to die a horrible death at any moment that they should take the time they have to find what enjoyment they can, and Milva decided to join in. It just so happened they did not die that night and now Milva is carring a halfling for whom she does not know the fathers name (for safety no names were shared with the elves she guided)
i think they generally said that ciri lost her elder blood powers after the king of the hunt was killed right? otherwise I’m gonna be really curious how handle that as well. she should be sort of the world’s greatest sorceress otherwise.
She gave up her magic after trying to use fire as a source of power out of desperation while navigating out of the “Frying Pan” desert. She wanted to save Little Horse the unicorn after an unfortunate battle with a monster she hadn’t yet learned of, but no other sources were available. My understanding is fire as a magical source is all consuming so it is forbidden to pull from for safety reasons, but that was largely left up to interpretation.
Upon pulling from fire, she saw the imense power that presented her, the ability to rule the entire world, but also how that would hurt those she cared so deeply about, so she instead gave up her sourceress’ powers.
If you want anything to complain about in the books it should be Milva’s winging about being an illiterate farm girl that honestly was out of character and just seemed written in so she wouldn’t outshine the others
Edit: Cahir’s attraction to Ciri is also creepy as hell the way it’s written, but that might be intentional, since that’s at a point where she’s coming to realize that everyone wants something from her, everyone will tell her why she should want to give them what they want from her but nobody ever seems to care or ask what she actually wants.
I mean, I prayed to the nether gods that we’d get a Letho game. He’s the perfect protagonist if they wanted to move away from the books and more firmly into their own OC. Always had huge main character energy, and would be perfectly suited for exploring the morally grey areas of the Witcher world.
If anything, Ciri's the character whose story is wrapped up by the end of Witcher 3, she saved the world and fulfilled her destiny. Unlike Geralt or the sorceresses, she does get old too.
It's definitely understandable that a lot of players would feel betrayed at having Ciri becoming the MC after 3 games of Geralt. People would riot if you made someone else than Lara Croft the MC of tomb raider. A better solution would probably be a character creator for a new generation of witchers. Ciri is too powerful to be the MC.
Isn’t the good ending geralt giving her a Witcher blade and calling her an official witcher? That to me sets up part 4. End of the day im glad geralt gets a rest. Besides they’re remaking 1 and 2 so the geralt fix will come
There's plenty of different endings, but yeah that's probably the one they'll make canon.
The thing is Geralt is The Witcher, making Ciri the protagonist is a bastardization of the saga. Imagine that J.K rowling came up with a new book, titled it Harry Potter 8, and made the protagonist Hermione. To me this shows a real lack of understanding of their audience, people play The Witcher for the fantasy of being Geralt, of being a monster killer, of hooking up with every sorceress. But obviously IP sells, and they aren't gonna change the title of the saga to something like "child of the elder blood".
I wish them the best of luck, maybe they'll pull off a fallout 3 and reinvent themselves. But I personally will be passing on this spinoff.
I’m a Borderlands fan, but it absolutely isn’t even in the same universe of quality as BG3. Borderlands is dumb, pretty shitty and lost quality with each game. It’s mindless fun, like B movie popcorn flicks.
I would absolutely disagree. Fun, maybe. Mindless fun? No. I’m fine with games that are mindless fun, but it isn’t what all games should strive for. I personally much prefer games that require your focus and consideration.
Mindless fun is cheap and easy. Making a game that sits in people minds for years is difficult and takes effort, but is much more rewarding. BG3, for example, is anything but mindless, which is why it’s been able to still be in conversations for so long after it released. How much do people talk about Call of Duty, even though it sells like crazy?
i hear talk about call of duty all the time, and especially in its heyday it was talked about pretty much everywhere. meanwhile i only hear BG3 talked about online or from my brother who’s currently playing it. so i think you just proved your own self wrong there. CoD and borderlands are 2 game franchises that are already talked about a lot. hell just look at this own post, its about borderlands
People talk about playing CoD. They don’t discuss the game really, and also this is being discussed because it’s news, and also because they’re being greedy and stupid. Again, it isn’t the game being discussed.
BG3 people talk about the story, the writing, the gameplay, etc. They talk about how the game is something actually made for players, to be enjoyed, not by business people to make money. They talk about the game.
Saying “do you want to play CoD tonight” is different than discussing why the gameplay of CoD is good/new/innovative/whatever.
I actually did see people discuss the campaign of the new CoD (or maybe the one before) because it was actually fairly unique for them. Other than that, the only time I hear about CoD is people talking about how much money it makes, how bad the skins are, or things like that. It holds almost no relevance in game discussion circles because everything they did well has been innovated on since then.
People talked about how smooth and responsive CoD 4 was, because it was innovating. People don’t talk about the mechanics of whatever the latest CoD is, because it’s not doing anything worth copying.
I also see posts about it often on !games, although admittedly I don’t pay attention to the usernames of the people who make those posts, or the usernames of the people commenting. But I’d doubt the comments are all just @Cethin talking to themselves ;)
Eh, I wouldn’t say even mindless fun is easy, from what I hear game dev is hard and a lot of effort and hard work can still end up in something unfun. Probably not your intention but I don’t want to devalue the efforts of people who probably want to make something to help other people enjoy a bit, that I probably don’t have the skill to make myself.
I’m a hobbyist game dev, and I have friends in the industry, and yeah it hard to make anything at all. I meant more that it’s easy to conceptualize mindless fun. Implementing either is just as hard really.
But that type of fun is something I can get from many other games, making borderlands way less desirable if it’s $80. On the other hand if larian says that their next game is $80, I already know that I won’t find that type of experience anywhere else and I might just splurge.
what game would you consider “not pure dogshit”? seriously, what games? give me a list, because if an acclaimed franchise that was widely praised and birthed a literal genre is considered dogshit, then what isnt dogshit?
I didn’t even buy Borderlands 3 for $60 and there’s no way in hell I’d pay $80 for something similar. I spent the full price of Baldur’s Gate 3 for myself and two of my friends for a total of $180. Make the game worth it and you have my money. If the development cost of games has gone up then prove it and make better games.
It and it’s DLC sold just fine because BL3 is miles above BL2 in gameplay (though yes it’s story and voice acting are painful, 2 hasn’t aged as well as many of us might remember it did in that regard, either)
Tbh I expect the same thing for this one: better gameplay, worse writing
Having seen the tonal shift in the gameplay preview I’d actually expect better writing, or at least more bearable writing. Gameplay looked more fine tuned but mostly the same as 3.
I won’t. Nobody is able to define what “wokeness” really means to them because it’s mostly code for “subset of people I don’t want to exist around me”.
Surprisingly, that doesn’t sound very good when said out loud.
“Woke” has had a consistent meaning since its introduction into the English language almost a hundred years ago. It means “Aware of systemic racism.”
When blues legend Lead Belly ended a show in 1938 by saying, “Stay woke,” he meant: “Stay aware of systemic racism.”
When some chud on YouTube in 2025 says “‘Woke’ is ruining gaming,” he means that awareness of systemic racism is ruining gaming. For him.
And when an American politician calls himself “anti-woke”, he’s saying that he opposes the awareness of systemic racism. Not that he denies the existence of it, but that he’d prefer no one talk about it, so that it can continue.
When some chud on YouTube in 2025 says “‘Woke’ is ruining gaming,” he means that awareness of systemic racism is ruining gaming. For him.
I don’t think it even goes that far tbh. Especially for less political, more gamer-type “conservatives”, it just means “the other side”, forcing so many girls (1) into their game. Maybe it’s just to deflect having to admit to being a misogynist.
And when an American politician calls himself “anti-woke”, he’s saying that he opposes the awareness of systemic racism. Not that he denies the existence of it, but that he’d prefer no one talk about it, so that it can continue.
Yes, exactly. No sane person would call themselves “anti-woke”. Unless they’re successful in subverting its meaning to be “those we’ll put in concentration camps”. Oh wait, that still wouldn’t make you sane.
Yes I agree with your interpretation of what woke currently means. I’m saying that this is actually using woke ironically an insult. An unironic usage has no negative connotations.
The author James Lindsay has defined it in similar terms, as “a victimhood-based identity politics” whose “victim groups are whites, Christians, men, and straight people”. He argues that the movement is “roughly intersectional” insofar as it is obsessed with identity politics and a grievance relating to anti-white racism. “Like their counterparts on the Woke Left,” Lindsay writes, “the Woke Right have accepted as fact that there’s a conspiracy against people like them and that their only real hope is to lean into the identity grouping and advocate for collective power under that heading”. In these terms, the “woke right” is a kind of ideological doppelgänger, whose members exhibit the same precisionist and absolutist tendencies of their leftist counterparts.
Pierce Morgan uses it more and more often against right wingers to great effect.
Right. The right wingers are arguing (usually without knowing it because they don’t understand words) for people to stay asleep and not think or question
Woke means being aware that an interaction with a cop is a life or death situation. Cops aren’t your friends, they’re not here to protect you. They’re a threat, motivated by cruelty and love of power. When dealing with a cop, you have to speak gently, keep your hands visible at all times, and declare your intentions for every action. Or you could die. You could still die even if you do all that.
I think that ship has sailed. That word is at the moment a clear sign the person using it is an asshole. It can be reclaimed, but right now I don’t see that happening.
I would love to not let the nazis dictate how the swastika is used, but their perversion of the original meaning has permanently altered how it’s seen by the rest of the world. Claiming the moral high ground by trying to force something to mean what it no longer does is a pointless exercise.
It’s not about claiming the moral high ground, it’s just that you can’t have a word that can be used to mean its opposite, even if “sarcastically”. The word woke is just the past tense of wake, nothing else. It can be used to represent someone “waking up” from the hide-your-head-in-the-sand routine, or becomes able to see things from a new perspective. For the right, it doesn’t really mean anything, but they are pretty much using it as the new “sheeple”. Which doesn’t make any sense.
But the important thing is this: if someone is ridiculing people for wanting to be informed, involved in society, or generally just themselves, the only thing they’re actually insulting is their own intelligence and heart. If we let them have their use of woke as a generic mean insult, we lose sight of that.
More than swastikas, I think this case is closer to saying “you can use literally to mean figuratively because it’s common use” to which I also say no, fuck that.
But yes, swastikas forever symbolise Nazism. That doesn’t negate their original, positive meaning previously found in history, religion and culture. This is not an “achtually it’s ok to draw swastikas because they are actually good”. I’m just saying that context, and intent, matters. If you tattoo one on yourself as a westerner, you’re a Nazi - and it’s ok that everyone treats you like one. But should those original uses be stopped because it’s now “forever bad”?
Do you really need a guide? It works exactly the same as Windows. The only difference is you need to run it through WINE with Proton. That’s easiest handled with Heroic Launcher or Lutris, which you’re probably already using one of these already. Just add the executable and launch it. (You may need to run an installer first, which Heroic at least makes really easy.)
I’ll buy this when it’s $20 with all expansions in two years.
It’s not because of Randy Bobandy here, him making an inane, alienating comment is his gimmick at this point and should be expected. It’s t because I found that if I play a game on release I end up playing the worst version of the game. And then I never play expansions because I rarely replay games and I’m not about to play an expansion to a game I haven’t played in a year without replaying the base game again.
So I buy games a year late, at half the price. I love gaming.
Love doing this with modern atlus games. Cant wait to buy the “royal golden reloaded remaster collection” edition for $20 from a used/third party retailer.
I’ve said for years that one or more of the main characters should be prominent, but you play most of the game as a custom character and you get to choose your witcher school. So I’m sort of hoping that she’s the protagonist and main character in a similar way to how she is TW3.
Eh, idk. The Witcher universe has a framework for an RPG, but the books have always been about Geralt and Co. You could do something different in that universe, but I think the story and the games have some very strong structure that comes from the player being Geralt and living his story.
Witchers are a rare dying breed. Trying to shove another new generic Witcher in would force you into writing a whole new series of stories, and backgrounds, just for that one character, which would make it get lost in the mix imho.
Exactly. They can charge $200 if they want to but it doesn't mean people are going to buy at that price. The price point needs to be where people are okay paying for it and I don't see it happening at $80. Okay, I lied a bit, I see it happening for some games but not for BL4.
I'm willing to eat my words but I doubt I need to. In a world where Clair Obscur costs $50 I don't how see how BL could be $30 better than one of the best games released this year.
If Ubisoft can convince themselves that Skull and Bones was the first “quadruple A game” and worth $70, then I doubt most studio execs can pull their heads out their ass for long enough to properly ask themselves that. Studios have completely lost touch with what people actually want and are willing to pay.
It’s about time women got more accurate representation in games. How many games have you play as a man compared to playing as a woman? Technically it should be 50/50 to more accurately represent the real world.
I don’t think representation is the main issue, it is more about how they are presented.
Striding for a perfect 50/50, doesn’t really sense if they are all just stereotypes and sexual objectified. Also there are many other underrepresented population groups.
IMO, it is more important to focus good well written and complex characters, that represent real circumstances right.
I don’t complain that AAA studios have gone ‘woke’ because they now include choices to select from marginalized groups, I complain about them because they are often do not offer a deeper perspective of people in that group and are just different skins.
In some way, I can understand, games often happen in a Fantasy world, but I would wish that selecting different characters would do more than just exchanging the player mesh, texture and voice pack.
The well written part is my concern. Or we will get the same quality as a lot of recent movies and shows. Where the characters are stereotypes, poorly written, poorly developed. With plot points that are just randomly forced into the story, and that plot point has nothing to do with the rest of the story. You know the ones, where something has been added to the story and has no reason or meaning or benefit to being part of the story.
Unless you are also complaining about it when white male characters are also surface-level, 2-D, copy-and-paste characters then all you are saying is “Only white male characters are allowed to be simple or a stereotype/trope.” Lets be honest, not every game needs a complex and well written character, and that is fine. If they choose to go that route it doesn’t matter what race, religion, or gender the character is in the first place. So it doesn’t matter if they are a white male, a latina woman, or a black non-binary person.
Now I’m also not gonna shut down your solution without being constructive and providing my own solution, cause I don’t think quotas are the answer either. Instead we should be uplifting and empowering marginalized creators and game designers so that they can make more characters that they want to make. Which is generally characters they can relate to. If people want more characters that are women, then the game industry needs to become a safe space for women and empower them so they can provide more representation for characters. Same thing for any other demographic. That will make sure that these characters are being made in an aethentic and organic way, and not just being pumped out to meet a quota, but also isn’t restricting when marginalized demographics can be used as characters.
Unless you are also complaining about it when white male characters are also surface-level, 2-D, copy-and-paste characters then all you are saying is “Only white male characters are allowed to be simple or a stereotype/trope.”
What? Where am I saying that?
Yes I would complain about all kind of stereotypes. Even the “white muscular tough guy” could be considered sexual objectification. IMO CoD is sometimes pretty gay coded.
Lets be honest, not every game needs a complex and well written character, and that is fine. If they choose to go that route it doesn’t matter what race, religion, or gender the character is in the first place. So it doesn’t matter if they are a white male, a latina woman, or a black non-binary person.
I wasn’t saying that. You can have games without a single character. Or where the character doesn’t really matter, because it just an empty shell you are driving around and not more.
But IMO I mostly play story driven RPGs, where you are someone, and where you want the environment to react to you. It would be awesome if when you run around with colorful hair or tattoos, it would slightly change the disposition of the NPCs or cause them to comment on your appearance. Don’t let this stuff be just cosmetics, it should be more meaningful, and embedded into the game world.
That’s why the trailer has me so hyped for this game. It looks like the game is going to be different because Ciri is the protagonist. Her experience, reactions, and approach to saving a young woman from being sacrificed are totally different than what Geralt’s would be. I hate it when games like Mass Effect are like “Oh! You can play as FemShep! That totally counts as representation!” even though it changes literally nothing about the story.
I want more games that actually address the real and significant differences in the experiences and perspectives of different characters. I’m always disappointed when there’s a “female” option that’s just a re-skin of the male character with no changes in how the character interacts with the world and the story. (This happens a lot in non-video game media too.)
Video games are not the real world. They do not have to follow the rules of the real world. Even if parts or all of the game model the real world, video games are artwork, and artwork invents its own rules. Trying to enforce rules onto art has not worked well in the past, and will likely not work well in the future either.
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