Lore has always been a tricky subject for fans when it comes to adaptations: Too close an adherence to the original text, and you get a diminished version of the thing you already love; too loose an adaptation, and suddenly your beloved series is unrecognizable. I’m fairly outspoken about my belief that as far as the Netflix TV show is concerned, Witcher fans have had it rougher than most when it comes to their franchise being sullied by poor decisions. So it’s no surprise that when CD Projekt Red revealed the first trailer for The Witcher 4, which features Ciri as its main character and seemingly a full-blown Witcher, some fans (albeit a minority) met it with skepticism. However, with three Witcher games under its belt already, CD Projekt Red has earned the benefit of the doubt.
The most understandable of these fans’ concerns seem to be over how The Witcher 4 fits into the world and canon of Andrzej Sapkowski’s books. For instance, Ciri, after the events of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, would have been older than normal to undergo the Trial of the Grasses, and in the books, much of her magic was taken away from her as she saved Ihuarraquax — yet in the trailer, she uses magic freely. What’s confusing about these concerns from fans, however, is how unaware they seem to be of the relationship between CD Projekt Red’s games and the Witcher canon already. It’s not that the two have diverged, necessarily, so much as it is that they weren’t ever tightly bound to begin with.
The Witcher games have never been strict adherents to the books they’re based on. Instead, they’ve always been more about committing to the spirit and themes of Sapkowski’s series than about giving virtual life to his words. And, as a fan of Sapkowski’s books, I think that’s one of the greatest virtues of CD Projekt Red’s game series. The rich complexity and detail of the world and characters that Sapkowski created always felt like they could be stretched far more broadly beyond the pages of his novels and short stories, and in the capable hands of CDPR, we’ve been able to see that expansion of the world.
This is part of what makes The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt arguably the best entry of any variety in the entire Witcher franchise. That game jumps past the established canon of Sapkowski’s novels, imagining a slightly extracanonical story that takes place several years after the books’ tale has ended. It’s an expansion and continuation of the stories of Geralt, Yennefer, and Ciri, but it grasps the essence of their characters, and of The Witcher’s entire world, as well as anything in the series’ history.
Throughout The Witcher 3, Geralt’s mission to find Ciri, then to save her, brings him into contact with the strangest inhabitants of his world. And while the game gives you choices about how to deal with them, CDPR’s writing does a magnificent job of keeping you on your toes, constantly giving Geralt’s quests unexpected and often tragic outcomes despite his best intentions — keeping them thematically resonant with the best of Sapkowski’s short stories. In other words, it’s everything the Netflix series has failed at; thus far, the creative team for the show has pretty closely adapted the plot of Sapkowski’s novels, but seems wholly uninterested in his themes.
But what’s even more confusing for the self-proclaimed fans of The Witcher 3 who now express skepticism over Ciri’s evolution in The Witcher 4 is that her transformation was first introduced in Wild Hunt. Depending on the choices players made throughout the game, Ciri could either end The Witcher 3 dead, as the queen of Nilfgaard, or on the path to becoming a Witcher. The question of how she got from that path to where we see her in The Witcher 4’s cinematic trailer seems less like a plot hole and more like the exact plot of The Witcher 4 itself, something that was confirmed Friday on X by CDPR studio head Adam Badowski.
And the truth is, as a fan of Ciri and of Sapkowski’s books, I feel lucky that CD Projekt Red is committed to continuing her story and giving her a narrative future. Given the studio’s track record so far of capably expanding on Sapkowski’s characters and world, it’s hard to imagine her in better hands — including those of her original author. The only real downside is that it could be quite a few years before we actually get to see how her story plays out.