Witcher 4 Fans Debate Whether Ciri Will Be the Main Character

CD Projekt Red’s announcement of The Witcher 4 (for lack of an official name) has sent fans into a frenzy as they try to decipher the studio’s teaser image.

While it doesn’t show much, the art features a Witcher medallion partly submerged in snow, which some fans believe is linked to a major character from the last game, Ciri.

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This rest of this article features major spoilers from The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

CD Projekt Red has previously announced that previous protagonist, Geralt’s journey has concluded, and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’s canon ending certainly alludes to a Ciri spin-off. For those unfamiliar, the game ends with Geralt giving Ciri a new sword as she begins her own journey as a Witcher.

Ciri also wears a Cat School medallion, something not discussed in the games but is instead taken straight from Andrzej Sapkowski’s original book series – and some fans believe the revealed medallion represents a cat.

That being said, The Witcher series already has a cat medallion, and it doesn’t really look like the new Witcher 4 tease. In fact, none of the current in-game Witcher medallions match the new art:

CD Projekt Red could have created a brand new Witcher school – just as they did with The Witcher 2’s Letho, who’s part of the Viper School. The game trilogy, while based on The Witcher books and largely loyal to its canon, tells entirely fresh stories taking place after the events of Sapkowski’s work, meaning these kinds of inventions fit into the world quite neatly.

It’s also entirely possible that the developer has just redesigned the medal. Geralt’s medallion looks different in the books compared to the Netflix show, for example, and even has a slightly different design from the first Witcher game to Wild Hunt.

While the Netflix show is a completely different canon to that of the books or the games, the teased image actually looks most like Vesemir’s symbol from The Witcher anime film: Nightmare of the Wolf.

Vesemir – Geralt’s Witcher mentor – received a Netflix standalone, the title screen of of which shows a decayed version of a wolf medallion that looks somewhat like the one teased by CD Projekt Red.

Comparing the Witcher 4 tease to Vesemir’s decayed medallion. Credit: CD Projekt Red/Netflix

Given that Vesemir dies in the course of The Witcher 3, a new game about him would need to be set a long time before the events of the current trilogy, but several teases of Vesemir’s past exist in the books and games already. That includes a major but rarely discussed event known as the Sacking of Kaer Morhen that could make for a dramatic central plot point.

These are all just fan theories, of course, and CD Projekt Red likely won’t reveal more information for a long while. The developer announced the game on March 21, just a few hours after a fan potentially found The Witcher 3’s final secret, and didn’t say much else except that the game will run in Unreal Engine 5.

CD Projekt Red last released a mainline Witcher game with Wild Hunt’s release in 2015, but has since released Cyberpunk 2077, The Witcher Tales: Thronebreaker, and Gwent. IGN recently gave The Witcher 3 a top spot on our best open world games of all time and in our 9/10 review said “massive in size and meticulously detailed, The Witcher 3 ends Geralt’s story on a high note.”

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelancer who occasionally remembers to tweet @thelastdinsdale.