On revision: Witcher and CDPR

 

Facing a draught in video game releases coming in the near future when it comes to the world of RPGs, I'm forced to look misty eyed into the clouds to try and make out what lies on the horizon. In that vein I really do think we're going to see the strongest showing out of those that both need to prove themselves and still have the hunger in their bones to do it. Bioware have given up their RPG routes in their entirety and are expecting a round of applause for that, Bethesda still have me wondering if they even know what people are thinking about their recent releases- all that's left right now is to look at CDPR- because they certainly showed they aren't willing to let their reputation fade to dust even if they have to kick two years of post launch support to salvage it. In that light I actually have some high expectations for the upcoming 'The Witcher 4'.

The Witcher remains my special little game I discovered back when the rest of the world were still totally oblivious. To this day The Witcher 2 gets looked at with an unturned nose as some sort of black-child of the franchise- along with the original, I guess. (I suppose it's more just 3 being considered 'The Golden Child' in that light.) I remember absolutely falling in love with a totally mature Fantasy game that nailed political drama in a fantastical world with consequence and personality- truly it was the height of the RPG action world back in it's day. And yes it was messy at times, but it stuck with me- and I actually think there are aspects that original that outstrip even The Witcher 3 to this very day! And it seems to me like going back to some of those hallmarks might just be the future of The Witcher franchise in the coming instalment.

Of course those three Witcher Games covered the journey of 'Geralt of Rivia', the star of the books and ailing TV show, through a pretty complete summation of his journeys post the then-end of the original narrative. Where we go from here is entirely up to the whims and wants of the CDPR team, which is partially why I'm really expecting we see something truly beyond the barriers of what we're seen thus far from the studio. Essentially from here on the franchise is their fantasy plaything to go wild with, just as The Elder Scrolls belongs to Bethesda and Final Fantasy belongs to Sqaure Enix. They can go absolute nuts with the scope, the characters and most-importantly: the consequence of the player's actions within that world space.

Sure, there were choices in the original games. But all to a the degree that could roughly fit into the character of who Geralt already was- which itself was a nice grounding aspect to the way they presented the narrative so that CDPR didn't actually have to play out every reality in their mind. As it turns out this quirk would actually stick in the way they tell their stories and bleed into Cyberpunk- which itself was not a total 'free choice' RPG but rather players iterating on a pre-set character that the team already had largely in mind. This really is a limiting factor I think they need to push past in order to push their RPGs to the next level- not go the way of lazy Ubisoft and their one note protagonists with no value or growth to them. Which is why I think that CDPR's real competitor to bring themselves up against is going to be Larian.  

Yeah, I know: "He's brings that bloody game up every blog!" But it stands to bear that Baldur's Gate 3 is the template through which the gaming world is shaped. The very fabric of what an RPG can be is based around the promise of 'reactivity'. You role play in a world that reacts to what you do- however the extent to which that was possible tended to be inelastic. The bigger and fancier your game was, the less space there really was to be truly reactive to the player's choices. Which is how we got into a situation where the more money the Dragon Age franchise receives the less they begin resembling actual RPGs until we hit the point where we're at now. Baldur's Gate 3 bucked this trend to thunderous and overwhelming applause- The Witcher 4 needs to follow suit.

We've already gotten somewhat confirmation that The Witcher 4 is going to star an entirely brand new build-a-bear Witcher who embarks on a journey all of their own, which could be the perfect formula to create a really substantive narrative of exploring the dark fantasy mires of The Northern territories and  

discover what they make of you. Cyberpunk 2077 already proved that CDPR aren't afraid to really delve into the question of 'who are you' even in an RPG, I'd love to see that expanded into a highly political fantasy world stuffed to the brim with warring factions and uneasy allegiances. Maybe we'll get another story of how it feels to circle oblivion with no way out- or perhaps we'll start legend building on a journey to make a hero to rival the white wolf. Maybe they'll get really crazy and move the fiction of the world up to the age of the renaissance and see what happens there! The possibilities are actually pretty exciting.

Already CDPR are praising themselves with a hardy clap on the back for the extent of their technology going into this new Witcher game, talking about how it surpasses anything they've worked on before. And to that point I just want to helpfully remind you all that Cyberpunk 2077 is still the benchmark to which all new innovations in fidelity are tested, so whatever they're working on which apparently puts that to shame must be making current hardware shudder in it's boots. I weep to think of what my measly GeForce card is being threatened with. But my inner masochist also welcomes the challenge with gusto. And if the technicians are bringing it- you know that the rest of the studio are being edged to match that level of innovation.

I've been rightfully hard on CDPR over the past few years but I try not to be outwardly nasty, and that's because I still have a lot of love and respect for this studio. I was angry because I know they can do better and I know this team has a few hits left in it before it starts to go the way of Bioware and, seemingly, Bethesda. I never held these artists on the same minuscule level as I do Ubisoft, because I truly do think they have the capacity to set the world on fire once again as even their poor releases have done before. The Witcher 4 may still be a sparkle in the milkman's eye, but it's one I'm getting ramped up to start hyping for once that reveal hits. Although, something tells me we're going to waiting until the next generation for that one. Just a hunch.

The Witcher 4 question

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Welp, we have an irrefutable example to hold up to the rest of the gaming industry that deciding to rush a game to launch in order to capitalize off the hype from today in hopes that the momentary rush of bedazzled early adopters will offset the backlash of a broken product is a risky venture no matter how big the game in question is. Unless, of course, you happen to be running a studio producing sports games, because Sports fans are straight sadomasochists when it comes to getting screwed out of their money for belittling value games. (Which is why the Sports game industry is dead in innovation, funnily enough.) Even after a whirlwind amount of sales for Cyberpunk, interest and respect for the game quickly fell off once people realised that only the prologue vaguely resembled the game that CDPR sold it as and how the actual game was riddled with bugs and/or totally unplayable depending on your system. Now, nearly two years after the fact, CDPR has lost roughly 75% of their company value and has surrender their spot as most valuable games company in Europe and most valuable company in Poland. (Somehow Techland have earnt that spot. Weirdly.)

So the mountains have wobbled and toppled over themselves and everyone is crying blue murder about the unannounced changes that are coming to the Cyberpunk 2077 post game support. It's becoming increasingly apparent that the promised 2 DLCs, with the first one testing the waters and the second being the game changing kick to the nuts in the vein of The Witcher 3's 'Blood and Wine' has been reduced to one small DLC. So where does CDPR expect to go next once they've finished airing out all those Cyberpunk plans that were in development too long to just scrap? (Like the 'Edgerunners' Anime that looks okay) Well they've actually already let us into that little secret thanks to a teaser screen shot of something we all very much know; a Witcher Medallion buried in snow. Oh yeah, they're doing the Witcher 4.

What makes this interesting is not only the fact that the storytellers fell over themselves at the end of Blood and Wine to let us know that this is the end of the story and we need to let Geralt rest, but that thanks to that retirement wherever we pick up the Witcher next is likely to have absolutely no connective tissue with The Witcher books thanks to the jettisoning of the last canon characters. Of course, The Witcher games always set themselves as occurring after the canon of the books, and are now a separate canon altogether thanks to another book being released since they started making the games. But Geralt was always very much The Witcher, and the games tended to bring themselves back into the path of characters from his long history. Triss Merigold, Yennifer, Ciri; so where we go next from here is pretty much uncharted grounds for the franchise.

And let me just be the first to express my disappointment that we won't be following Ciri through this game. I mean I suppose it was always going to be that way due to the exponential power of Ciri's abilities that would make any attempt to create a balanced gameplay experience antithetical to her canon power level, (you could just throw up a hand wavey power-draining excuse though. Every game does it!) as well as the multiple endings of the Witcher 3 that could very well end with Ciri locked in a stuffy dress for the rest of her life or even dead! (Although let's be honest with each other. We all know that only one of those endings for Ciri is canon. Ain't nobody patting themselves on the back and pimping on with a thoroughly dead Ciri.) I just assumed the reason why the CDPR team were so deadset against bringing Ciri into Cyberpunk 2077 was because they had plans for her in The Witcher 4, but it seems not. The director was just super self-conscious of their game not being seen as a cross-over property like Kingdom Hearts or Smash Bros. (Did he make that Smash Bros comparison himself? I think he did; and if he did that is more than a little asinine.)

All we currently have to go on for what will be covered in The Witcher 3 is the animal pedant in the snow which has been revealed to be of the Witcher School of the Lynx. A school that doesn't exist in the books or games, meaning that we essentially know nothing. However we do know that around the time of The Witcher 3 the Witcher profession was exceedingly rare with the School of the Wolf being perhaps the only place left with the know-how left to create and train new Witchers. Geralt was a famous figure, a long lived Witcher who's reputation made him a go-to problem solver all over the unnammed realm of The Witcher, and presuming this new game follows a successor or contemporary that inherently means we're stepping into the shoes of someone considerably less famous. Of course, that's not taking into account the possibility that this could be a prequel game. (Not traditionally a 'prequel' in the sense of 'story that leads into the original story' but rather just in the 'set before' sense.)

What has me equally curious and worried is the prospect of expanding the border of a nameless world, because the world of the Witcher, whilst expansive, is designed to be very functional. Every wild tangent of lore and world building has it's relevant place within the narrative, even if only slightly, because the pace of the narrative is set to tell a story. Thus there aren't really huge patches of untapped potential waiting for the CDPR team unless they go into making their own narrative by scratch, which in a way they have already been doing all this time but never quite without the heavy spine of pre-set context propping them up. This is a frontier that I'm not sure they've come up against before. The Witcher springboarded off a popular book series in Poland, Cyberpunk off an established boardgame with help from the creator, primarily following an established legacy character from that pre-written fiction. The Witcher 4 will be uniquely CDPRs, making this a endeavour that could make or break their creative spine. 

I also worry about the difficulties that CDPR might have living up to what The Witcher 4 needs to be in the wake of Cyberpunk 2077. It's no secret that Cyberpunk was the culmination of all that studios successes up to that point; for every game they threw their entire weight into squeezing every inch of productivity out of their employees, often times regardless of how their work life balance. The great dichotomy of this industry is now that they fell face first with Cyberpunk, people are going to want The Witcher 4 to earn back the accolades of the study by being some massive product, maybe as big as what they pretended Cyberpunk was going to be; but the studio has suffered so much reputational damage, value shrinkage and general hardship that one has to wonder if that would even be feasible. Right now, CDPR is a studio with the reputation for burning it's staff to cinders without the offsetting prestige of being the industry golden boy. They might end up not attracting the level of talent they once did.

The Witcher 4 question I purpose is thus: Can The Witcher 4 restore faith in CDPR to the point it was at after The Witcher 3; and I think no. It might make some significant ground to that end, but The Witcher 3 was the culmination of an 8 year long franchise with a running narrative. (A loosely running narrative, but it was running along nonetheless) Mix that with the time when The Witcher 3 came out and the relatively lukewarm open world games that were growing stale, the pleasant surprise it ended up being for everyone involved; and much of what made that the hit it was turns out to be irreproducible. In some ways The Witcher 4 is looking like a big reset button for CDPR bringing them back to something resembling square one. Of course, that's 'square one' in comparison to the heights of Cyberpunk pre-release, and thus is still miles better than they were when they actually started out. So to break my two year long train of pessimism, I'm going to say that CDPR might claw their way back out of the doghouse for the industry, but its' going to be slow going.