So is this going to be like Cyber Punk where it’s another 8 years before it comes out? Regardless, I’ll enjoy returning to that world. It’ll be interesting to see where they go with Ciri.
So is this going to be like Cyber Punk where it’s another 8 years before it comes out?
Regardless, I’ll enjoy returning to that world.
It’ll be interesting to see where they go with Ciri.
This is a thematic rehash of Witcher 3's trailers: A Night to Remember, in which the witcher hunts and fights a dangerous monster, and Killing Monsters, in which the witcher defends a woman...
This is a thematic rehash of Witcher 3's trailers: A Night to Remember, in which the witcher hunts and fights a dangerous monster, and Killing Monsters, in which the witcher defends a woman against metaphorical monsters.
While a cinematic trailer doesn't tell us much about the game itself, the vibe I'm getting is 'more of the same' rather than 'forging a new path'. Ciri's world has not changed since Geralt's day. Ciri is doing the same things that Geralt did.
While I'm reminiscing about Witcher trailer action scenes, Letho's and A Night to Remember are fantastic, even if you never play the games.
Warning for all links in this post: these are violent fight scenes.
Everyone's talking about Ciri but I'm just hoping for more Gwent. Really excited to see what sort of minigame they include this time. Not many games have made a minigame as incredible as Gwent...
Everyone's talking about Ciri but I'm just hoping for more Gwent. Really excited to see what sort of minigame they include this time. Not many games have made a minigame as incredible as Gwent that went on to become its own standalone game. I doubt they'll catch lightning in a bottle twice, but damn I love me some Gwent.
I kinda wish it was a non-Ciri sequel, just with an original character and a new witcher school. Regardless, I think that the Witcher fan base will hate a woman as a protagonist. I think they'll...
I kinda wish it was a non-Ciri sequel, just with an original character and a new witcher school.
Regardless, I think that the Witcher fan base will hate a woman as a protagonist. I think they'll hide behind 'she shouldn't be able to drink witcher potions/she's too powerful to be a witcher!'
The Witcher writers are good enough to figure this out, but my experience of the fan base is that they are extremely misogynistic and will use 'canon' as a shield.
I'll play it, but I'm less excited than the idea of a clean slate with cameos from TW3 characters.
From everything I'm reading on The Witcher subreddit, they're pretty excited. I saw some confusion based on the current story with Ciri, because she was supposed to be ridiculously powerful, but I...
From everything I'm reading on The Witcher subreddit, they're pretty excited. I saw some confusion based on the current story with Ciri, because she was supposed to be ridiculously powerful, but I think people are just excited for a new Witcher game.
I'm sure there's going to be some misogyny about it, but I feel like this is a disingenuous representation of the fan base as a whole.
I must have been unlucky and run into the bad threads then, that's good to hear Edit: They seem pretty mad - as others have said, mostly about 'what does this mean for canon, she is not supposed...
I must have been unlucky and run into the bad threads then, that's good to hear
Edit: They seem pretty mad - as others have said, mostly about 'what does this mean for canon, she is not supposed to be able to do that/she's too powerful'
From only playing the game, I would have thought her super-awesome magical bloodline would make surviving it a trivial thing. But also that same super awesome magical bloodline would make fighting monsters a trivial thing, because she fought off The White Frost and won (in my save). I'm really interested to see where they go with this.
I think it'd be cool if she 'spent' all of her magical-juice on saving the world, and now she's just a slightly-magical person who can do signs, do little spells - that lightning seemed new - and drink potions.
I have to go with oblivater, I mostly see people just theorizing about witcher trials. Either you saw it at a different time. Or, and I mean this as constructively as possible, you might be...
Edit: They seem pretty mad
I have to go with oblivater, I mostly see people just theorizing about witcher trials. Either you saw it at a different time. Or, and I mean this as constructively as possible, you might be hyperfocussing on a minority of negative responses and making those out to be the whole fan base.
Can you point to any of the top comments that you think are people being misogynistic? Pretty much all of them I see are eitherexcited, mildly trepidatious with theorizing, or even openly...
Edit: They seem pretty mad
Can you point to any of the top comments that you think are people being misogynistic? Pretty much all of them I see are eitherexcited, mildly trepidatious with theorizing, or even openly positive. Surely this points to the majority of the fanbase being excited for this change.
I'm seeing almost an entire thread of To be fair though, it does seem like they're not angry about a woman being the protagonist. It seems more confusion about the lore change I should clarify...
I'm seeing almost an entire thread of
'she shouldn't be able to drink witcher potions/she's too powerful to be a witcher!'
To be fair though, it does seem like they're not angry about a woman being the protagonist. It seems more confusion about the lore change
I should clarify that, in my limited experience (I don't play many video games), The Witcher fans seemed the most misogynistic of the fan bases I browse. Granted, a lot of this was hate directed at the women who acted in and wrote the Netflix show. The subreddit dedicated to TW3 as a game is far more chill in that regard than the franchise-wide subreddit.
As someone who plays a lot of video games, in general I found the Witcher fanbase to be a lot less misogynistic than others I've been in. The series has several strong female characters (both in...
As someone who plays a lot of video games, in general I found the Witcher fanbase to be a lot less misogynistic than others I've been in. The series has several strong female characters (both in writing and in power), and while people have individual favorites they tend not to hate women as a group. In a lot of other communities (League of Legends, CoD, most competitive games tbh), women are verbally degraded to their faces just for existing in the same space. I never saw any of that in TW3 groups.
I agree that most of the anger I see seems to be pointed at lore changes. The trial of the grasses that Geralt undertook has a very high mortality rate, and neither Geralt nor Yennefer would have approved of Ciri going through it. Between that and her magic use (which could be explained by her elder blood, but it's uncertain), there's already deviations from established canon.
That is very enlightening, and scary. Thanks for that perspective, it's clear from this thread that (relative to other gaming communities), I seem to be off the mark with Witcher fans. To answer...
As someone who plays a lot of video games, in general I found the Witcher fanbase to be a lot less misogynistic than others I've been in. The series has several strong female characters (both in writing and in power), and while people have individual favorites they tend not to hate women as a group. In a lot of other communities (League of Legends, CoD, most competitive games tbh), women are verbally degraded to their faces just for existing in the same space. I never saw any of that in TW3 groups.
That is very enlightening, and scary. Thanks for that perspective, it's clear from this thread that (relative to other gaming communities), I seem to be off the mark with Witcher fans.
To answer the point made by @creesch - I may be hyperfocusing on the misogyny I've seen on the main Witcher sub and The Witcher 3 sub, but relative to my experience in other online communities, it seemed like a lot. To hear that it's not a lot relative to other games is very sad.
And I'm not sure what the specific cognitive bias is called, but extreme stuff sticks in my mind more than regular stuff. On the main Witcher sub, I remember a lot of highly upvoted posts using gendered insults in the titles. On the TW3 sub, I do remember a lot of posts calling women in the games 'this bitch', 'whore', etc. Not even antagonists - a lot of it was referring to Triss, or greyer characters like Anna Henrietta or Keira Metz.
ANYWAY! I'll cede the point and say that my experiences and what stuck out to me seems to be entirely at odds with everyone else here, and (even though I'm disapointed it's not an original character), I'm excited for TW4.
Video games really aren't generally for me, so I'm sorry if I misinterpreted anyone's favorite thing.
To be fair, Triss is not a good person. She takes advantage of Geralt's memory loss to trick him into falling in love with her, despite knowing that he is in love with Yennifer and is actually...
a lot of it was referring to Triss
To be fair, Triss is not a good person. She takes advantage of Geralt's memory loss to trick him into falling in love with her, despite knowing that he is in love with Yennifer and is actually very loyal to her. As for the insults being gendered, I've noticed that we tend to use different insults towards men and women - we're more likely to call a woman a bitch and a man a dick than the other way around, even for the exact same behavior.
Video games really aren't generally for me, so I'm sorry if I misinterpreted anyone's favorite thing.
I definitely didn't take it as an insult toward TW3 or the fandom, but just a take from a less experienced viewpoint. I really wish that what you've seen was the maximum extent of negativity in the gaming community, we would all be much better off for it.
I definitely think video games can be for everyone, but the ones that get the biggest hype tend to be the ones with the worst communities. We all deserve to have a bit of mindless fun every once in a while.
While I agree with your original point that the Witcher fandom isn't in my exp much more misogynistic than other major AAA gaming fandoms (because tbqh that's unfortunately not a high bar),...
As for the insults being gendered, I've noticed that we tend to use different insults towards men and women - we're more likely to call a woman a bitch and a man a dick than the other way around, even for the exact same behavior.
While I agree with your original point that the Witcher fandom isn't in my exp much more misogynistic than other major AAA gaming fandoms (because tbqh that's unfortunately not a high bar), gendered insults like these are generally misogynistic in nature. That is why they're used like this. Calling a male character a dick definitely isn't equivalent to calling a female character a bitch or a whore, and those insults are misogynistic even when they're applied to characters who are genuinely assholes. "Whore" especially is pretty indefensibly misogynistic and doesn't even come close to having a counterpart insult for men.
I didn't browse the whole thread, just sorted by the top and looked at a few comments, but I didn't see much that set off my alarm bells for misogyny. At the very most it seemed like people were...
I didn't browse the whole thread, just sorted by the top and looked at a few comments, but I didn't see much that set off my alarm bells for misogyny. At the very most it seemed like people were just upset about lore changes which has been happening for book-to-movie (or game) adaptations since they became a thing.
I definitely know where you're coming from though, but I think its important to distinguish actual misogyny like we saw with the Witcher fans towards the showrunner; from fantasy nerds being upset that their favorite book isn't being adapted as faithfully as they would have liked. Otherwise you could point to any criticism of the game and call it misogyny which I don't think is a very good-faith argument.
I also think its important to separate the loud, angry minority from the whole of a fanbase, and not generalize millions of people based on the opinions of a few thousand upset twitteroids. Calling a whole fanbase misogynistic/racist/cringe/stupid/ugly/etc for anything is usually too heavy handed.
I thought that most of the hate directed towards the Netflix show runner is because of the treatment of Henry Cavill. I hadn't seen it devolve into misogyny in my brief experience, but that's...
I thought that most of the hate directed towards the Netflix show runner is because of the treatment of Henry Cavill. I hadn't seen it devolve into misogyny in my brief experience, but that's disappointing to hear.
Eh there's always some overly dramatic crazy going for the low hanging fruit. It tends to drift into vision because of how much it stands out compared to more the benign takes of "Henry Cavill's...
Eh there's always some overly dramatic crazy going for the low hanging fruit. It tends to drift into vision because of how much it stands out compared to more the benign takes of "Henry Cavill's opinion being sidelined is hurting the show" or "how did they teleport from the city gates into the middle of the party".
Compare those two statements with a "DEI showrunner is ruining the story because she hates white men" and you'll notice the latter gets you going more than the other two did. In this case it was more the "anti-woke" that got riled up, but it happens in the other direction just as much.
Most people are the former however, and it's sometimes super difficult to find the area where discourse is friendly and constructive without some idiot barging in with their subzero IQ takes.
I've taken to just pull myself out of most conversations online that trend towards the worst. The Stellar Blade "controversy" is one of them. I just don't speak about it.
I can’t speak for the game fanbase, but Ciri is a protagonist in the books, so any fans of both the games and books should be fine with it. Anecdotally, the Netflix series really screwed up though...
I can’t speak for the game fanbase, but Ciri is a protagonist in the books, so any fans of both the games and books should be fine with it.
Anecdotally, the Netflix series really screwed up though by changing the central Ciri-Yennefer-Geralt relationship. I have no idea why that Geralt would forgive Yennefer and why Ciri loves Yen at all.
There is a lot of valid criticism from the fanbase with this franchise.
So as long as the new game doesn’t make a huge faux pas like that, the core fans will embrace a new game. It can be reasonably explained why and how Ciri underwent the mutations after Geralt and Yen left.
I'm not going to pretend the Witcher fandom is free from misogyny, but I think most of the outrage over there being a female protagonist is likely to be drummed up by alt right grifters who don't...
I'm not going to pretend the Witcher fandom is free from misogyny, but I think most of the outrage over there being a female protagonist is likely to be drummed up by alt right grifters who don't actually care that much about the game. I'm not sure if you watched the Shaun video about the Stellar Blade "controversy" when it was posted here on Tildes (I don't have a link on hand or I'd put it here), but it covered how these "anti-woke" grifters latch onto whatever they think they can make the next controversy and parrot each other's takes on it until they find the next thing to jump on. I think the bulk of the whining about Ciri as the protagonist comes from this crowd.
I think you're right. I'm seeing a fair few posts on Threads/Bluesky about great masses of people being mad about Ciri being the protagonist, and not looking 'feminine' enough, etc. I'm not seeing...
I think you're right. I'm seeing a fair few posts on Threads/Bluesky about great masses of people being mad about Ciri being the protagonist, and not looking 'feminine' enough, etc.
I'm not seeing the actual outrage - I think my filters work. But I'd guess the outrage is by created by monetized YouTubers who make profit from it, as you said.
Anyone who had played TW3 shouldn't be that surprised at Ciri being the protagonist. In my last save in the game, she's having a break from being a witcher at Corvo Bianco, after dragging a garkain's head into my villa.
I'm a little disappointed because I think the background for the other schools (especially Cat) is so cool, and the tease of the Lynx amulet set me up for an entirely new playable character. But I totally get wanting to continue the story with her at the center. She's at Corvo Bianco because she's my favourite character in the game, and I am so beyond excited to kill that last Crone as Ciri in this trilogy.
So is this going to be like Cyber Punk where it’s another 8 years before it comes out?
Regardless, I’ll enjoy returning to that world.
It’ll be interesting to see where they go with Ciri.
This is a thematic rehash of Witcher 3's trailers: A Night to Remember, in which the witcher hunts and fights a dangerous monster, and Killing Monsters, in which the witcher defends a woman against metaphorical monsters.
While a cinematic trailer doesn't tell us much about the game itself, the vibe I'm getting is 'more of the same' rather than 'forging a new path'. Ciri's world has not changed since Geralt's day. Ciri is doing the same things that Geralt did.
While I'm reminiscing about Witcher trailer action scenes, Letho's and A Night to Remember are fantastic, even if you never play the games.
Warning for all links in this post: these are violent fight scenes.
Everyone's talking about Ciri but I'm just hoping for more Gwent. Really excited to see what sort of minigame they include this time. Not many games have made a minigame as incredible as Gwent that went on to become its own standalone game. I doubt they'll catch lightning in a bottle twice, but damn I love me some Gwent.
I'm all in for this.
I kinda wish it was a non-Ciri sequel, just with an original character and a new witcher school.
Regardless, I think that the Witcher fan base will hate a woman as a protagonist. I think they'll hide behind 'she shouldn't be able to drink witcher potions/she's too powerful to be a witcher!'
The Witcher writers are good enough to figure this out, but my experience of the fan base is that they are extremely misogynistic and will use 'canon' as a shield.
I'll play it, but I'm less excited than the idea of a clean slate with cameos from TW3 characters.
From everything I'm reading on The Witcher subreddit, they're pretty excited. I saw some confusion based on the current story with Ciri, because she was supposed to be ridiculously powerful, but I think people are just excited for a new Witcher game.
I'm sure there's going to be some misogyny about it, but I feel like this is a disingenuous representation of the fan base as a whole.
I must have been unlucky and run into the bad threads then, that's good to hear
Edit: They seem pretty mad - as others have said, mostly about 'what does this mean for canon, she is not supposed to be able to do that/she's too powerful'
Edit edit: This IGN article goes into some depth about the lore changes that people seem to be mad about. Seems like the writers already consider Ciri to be a witcher, citing the books, and whilst they talk about the Trial of the Grasses, they don't go into detail about whether Ciri's undergone it or not.
From only playing the game, I would have thought her super-awesome magical bloodline would make surviving it a trivial thing. But also that same super awesome magical bloodline would make fighting monsters a trivial thing, because she fought off The White Frost and won (in my save). I'm really interested to see where they go with this.
I think it'd be cool if she 'spent' all of her magical-juice on saving the world, and now she's just a slightly-magical person who can do signs, do little spells - that lightning seemed new - and drink potions.
I have to go with oblivater, I mostly see people just theorizing about witcher trials. Either you saw it at a different time. Or, and I mean this as constructively as possible, you might be hyperfocussing on a minority of negative responses and making those out to be the whole fan base.
Can you point to any of the top comments that you think are people being misogynistic? Pretty much all of them I see are eitherexcited, mildly trepidatious with theorizing, or even openly positive. Surely this points to the majority of the fanbase being excited for this change.
I'm seeing almost an entire thread of
To be fair though, it does seem like they're not angry about a woman being the protagonist. It seems more confusion about the lore change
I should clarify that, in my limited experience (I don't play many video games), The Witcher fans seemed the most misogynistic of the fan bases I browse. Granted, a lot of this was hate directed at the women who acted in and wrote the Netflix show. The subreddit dedicated to TW3 as a game is far more chill in that regard than the franchise-wide subreddit.
As someone who plays a lot of video games, in general I found the Witcher fanbase to be a lot less misogynistic than others I've been in. The series has several strong female characters (both in writing and in power), and while people have individual favorites they tend not to hate women as a group. In a lot of other communities (League of Legends, CoD, most competitive games tbh), women are verbally degraded to their faces just for existing in the same space. I never saw any of that in TW3 groups.
I agree that most of the anger I see seems to be pointed at lore changes. The trial of the grasses that Geralt undertook has a very high mortality rate, and neither Geralt nor Yennefer would have approved of Ciri going through it. Between that and her magic use (which could be explained by her elder blood, but it's uncertain), there's already deviations from established canon.
That is very enlightening, and scary. Thanks for that perspective, it's clear from this thread that (relative to other gaming communities), I seem to be off the mark with Witcher fans.
To answer the point made by @creesch - I may be hyperfocusing on the misogyny I've seen on the main Witcher sub and The Witcher 3 sub, but relative to my experience in other online communities, it seemed like a lot. To hear that it's not a lot relative to other games is very sad.
And I'm not sure what the specific cognitive bias is called, but extreme stuff sticks in my mind more than regular stuff. On the main Witcher sub, I remember a lot of highly upvoted posts using gendered insults in the titles. On the TW3 sub, I do remember a lot of posts calling women in the games 'this bitch', 'whore', etc. Not even antagonists - a lot of it was referring to Triss, or greyer characters like Anna Henrietta or Keira Metz.
ANYWAY! I'll cede the point and say that my experiences and what stuck out to me seems to be entirely at odds with everyone else here, and (even though I'm disapointed it's not an original character), I'm excited for TW4.
Video games really aren't generally for me, so I'm sorry if I misinterpreted anyone's favorite thing.
To be fair, Triss is not a good person. She takes advantage of Geralt's memory loss to trick him into falling in love with her, despite knowing that he is in love with Yennifer and is actually very loyal to her. As for the insults being gendered, I've noticed that we tend to use different insults towards men and women - we're more likely to call a woman a bitch and a man a dick than the other way around, even for the exact same behavior.
I definitely didn't take it as an insult toward TW3 or the fandom, but just a take from a less experienced viewpoint. I really wish that what you've seen was the maximum extent of negativity in the gaming community, we would all be much better off for it.
I definitely think video games can be for everyone, but the ones that get the biggest hype tend to be the ones with the worst communities. We all deserve to have a bit of mindless fun every once in a while.
While I agree with your original point that the Witcher fandom isn't in my exp much more misogynistic than other major AAA gaming fandoms (because tbqh that's unfortunately not a high bar), gendered insults like these are generally misogynistic in nature. That is why they're used like this. Calling a male character a dick definitely isn't equivalent to calling a female character a bitch or a whore, and those insults are misogynistic even when they're applied to characters who are genuinely assholes. "Whore" especially is pretty indefensibly misogynistic and doesn't even come close to having a counterpart insult for men.
I didn't browse the whole thread, just sorted by the top and looked at a few comments, but I didn't see much that set off my alarm bells for misogyny. At the very most it seemed like people were just upset about lore changes which has been happening for book-to-movie (or game) adaptations since they became a thing.
I definitely know where you're coming from though, but I think its important to distinguish actual misogyny like we saw with the Witcher fans towards the showrunner; from fantasy nerds being upset that their favorite book isn't being adapted as faithfully as they would have liked. Otherwise you could point to any criticism of the game and call it misogyny which I don't think is a very good-faith argument.
I also think its important to separate the loud, angry minority from the whole of a fanbase, and not generalize millions of people based on the opinions of a few thousand upset twitteroids. Calling a whole fanbase misogynistic/racist/cringe/stupid/ugly/etc for anything is usually too heavy handed.
I thought that most of the hate directed towards the Netflix show runner is because of the treatment of Henry Cavill. I hadn't seen it devolve into misogyny in my brief experience, but that's disappointing to hear.
Eh there's always some overly dramatic crazy going for the low hanging fruit. It tends to drift into vision because of how much it stands out compared to more the benign takes of "Henry Cavill's opinion being sidelined is hurting the show" or "how did they teleport from the city gates into the middle of the party".
Compare those two statements with a "DEI showrunner is ruining the story because she hates white men" and you'll notice the latter gets you going more than the other two did. In this case it was more the "anti-woke" that got riled up, but it happens in the other direction just as much.
Most people are the former however, and it's sometimes super difficult to find the area where discourse is friendly and constructive without some idiot barging in with their subzero IQ takes.
I've taken to just pull myself out of most conversations online that trend towards the worst. The Stellar Blade "controversy" is one of them. I just don't speak about it.
The Stellar Blade thing is a good more recent equivalent. I don't personally like the game, but the rage against it is idiotic.
I can’t speak for the game fanbase, but Ciri is a protagonist in the books, so any fans of both the games and books should be fine with it.
Anecdotally, the Netflix series really screwed up though by changing the central Ciri-Yennefer-Geralt relationship. I have no idea why that Geralt would forgive Yennefer and why Ciri loves Yen at all.
There is a lot of valid criticism from the fanbase with this franchise.
So as long as the new game doesn’t make a huge faux pas like that, the core fans will embrace a new game. It can be reasonably explained why and how Ciri underwent the mutations after Geralt and Yen left.
Who dislikes Ciri...?
I'm not going to pretend the Witcher fandom is free from misogyny, but I think most of the outrage over there being a female protagonist is likely to be drummed up by alt right grifters who don't actually care that much about the game. I'm not sure if you watched the Shaun video about the Stellar Blade "controversy" when it was posted here on Tildes (I don't have a link on hand or I'd put it here), but it covered how these "anti-woke" grifters latch onto whatever they think they can make the next controversy and parrot each other's takes on it until they find the next thing to jump on. I think the bulk of the whining about Ciri as the protagonist comes from this crowd.
I think you're right. I'm seeing a fair few posts on Threads/Bluesky about great masses of people being mad about Ciri being the protagonist, and not looking 'feminine' enough, etc.
I'm not seeing the actual outrage - I think my filters work. But I'd guess the outrage is by created by monetized YouTubers who make profit from it, as you said.
Anyone who had played TW3 shouldn't be that surprised at Ciri being the protagonist. In my last save in the game, she's having a break from being a witcher at Corvo Bianco, after dragging a garkain's head into my villa.
I'm a little disappointed because I think the background for the other schools (especially Cat) is so cool, and the tease of the Lynx amulet set me up for an entirely new playable character. But I totally get wanting to continue the story with her at the center. She's at Corvo Bianco because she's my favourite character in the game, and I am so beyond excited to kill that last Crone as Ciri in this trilogy.