CD Projekt Red has confirmed to Eurogamer that the medallion in the picture teasing the new Witcher game does indeed resemble a lynx.
“Ok, some mysteries should not be so mysterious,” CD Projekt Red global communication director Robert Malinowski told me this afternoon. “I can confirm that the medallion is, in fact, shaped after a lynx.”
It puts to an end speculation that has been swirling ever since the image was released on Monday. The medallion’s likeness to a lynx is clear (see image below); the problem was that no Lynx School existed in the Witcher canon – not in the books or games or anywhere. That’s what had people’s brains in a twist.
Have you seen the second series of The Witcher on Netflix yet? There’s a terrific episode at the beginning with Kristofer Hivju in.
The only place it does exist, as Victoria explained in a news post earlier today, was fan fiction – in a post on The Witcher Fandom Wiki. The story dreamt up there was that witcher Lambert and sorceress Kiera Metz journeyed south after the events of The Witcher 3 and eventually joined and reformed the Cat School as the Lynx School.
Whether CD Projekt Red’s own Lynx School story will have anything to do with that, we don’t know. I imagine it’s probably unlikely. But it is a clear indicator that this new game, and possible set of games – it is referred to as “a new saga” after all – will revolve around different characters than we’ve played and seen before. Geralt and the others belonged to the Wolf School, remember.
Who those characters will be, we have no idea, and I doubt we’ll hear anything about it for a long time. Could it be Ciri, perhaps? She is probably the next most well known character after Geralt following The Witcher 3, and we have already played her in portions of the game. She is also, like Geralt, of paramount importance to The Witcher story and lore.
Or could it be someone else entirely? If the game is set in a completely different timeframe, this could work. But then who? Would it need to introduce us to someone as compelling as Geralt and hope we like them as much? A tall task.
Unless… Unless in the next Witcher game we make our own heroes, which would be a first for the series. Perhaps we could even follow them from childhood through the brutal Trial of Grasses and on to adulthood. We could make our own legends.
The new Witcher game has no release date or any other details whatsoever, but we do know it will be the first of CD Projekt Red’s big games not to be built on the in-house REDengine. Instead, it will use Unreal Engine 5.
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Cyberpunk 2077 will not be ported over to Unreal Engine 5, however. That game, and all future content for it, will remain RED-engine based.
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