Although CD Projekt Red has confirmed that Geralt’s story ended with The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, the studio has also suggested that it will be working on future games in The Witcher's universe using a new protagonist. The best fit for Geralt’s successor has been hotly debated among fans, with many players believing Ciri or a younger Vesemir to be the natural choice for the series’ player character going forward.
While there are plenty of arguments to be made about the strengths and weaknesses of Geralt’s potential replacements, discussions about the future of The Witcher rarely hit one particular reason the series could run into problems when it leaves Geralt behind. Here’s why The Witcher could struggle as an RPG without Geralt of Rivia, no matter how well-written the character who replaces him is.
Geralt's Personality
Geralt is the undeniable star of the Witcher series across almost all of the books, Witcher TV shows, and games. He’s a complicated character, an outcast who often protects those who scorn him, a stoic with a sense of humor, and a killer with a code.
The character’s deadpan sense of humor brings some much-needed levity to the franchise’s dark fantasy world. Geralt of Rivia’s personality is the key element that helps The Witcher stand out from other stories with similar fantasy settings. Much of the discussion around finding his replacement has focused on finding another character who is as well-rounded as Geralt, but there are reasons that might not be enough.
Geralt of Rivia’s greatest strengths as a character make him particularly hard to replace. Geralt has a few character traits which don’t just make him a great character in the Witcher books and shows, but are particularly well-suited to his role as an RPG protagonist.
Geralt occupies an interesting space among gaming’s RPG heroes. Unlike RPG protagonists like Skyrim’s Dragonborn he is far from a blank slate. In fact, his personality shines through in almost every piece of dialogue, and he’s even more clearly defined than other fully-voiced RPG protagonists like Mass Effect’s Commander Shepard.
Despite this, Geralt is still a particularly immersive character. Witcher fans rarely feel like they’re just watching Geralt’s story when playing the games – it’s surprisingly easy to project onto Geralt despite how specific his characterization is. There are a few reasons for this.
RPG Protagonists And Projection
Despite being a more clearly defined character than many RPG protagonists, Geralt’s personality often leaves his internal life open to a degree of interpretation. While he isn’t an emotionless mutant like many of the people he meets believe, he is a stoic, and behind his deadpan delivery it’s easy to imagine Geralt as either a tough guy with a heart of gold or an embittered outcast. In some sense, he’s both.
It helps that many of the choices the player is presented with in the games are morally ambiguous to the extreme. This ambiguity making it believable that the Geralt from the books could go down either path the player chooses. One decision in The Witcher 3, for example, sees the player choose between saving a group of children at the risk of unleashing an evil spirit, or allowing those children to die.
Geralt’s own mantra – “if I’m to choose between one evil and another I’d rather not choose at all” – allows The Witcher's writers to give players plenty of options without any of them feeling out of character. Geralt’s penchant for breaking his own rule throughout the original stories adds to that flexibility.
Geralt might ultimately be a good person in the books, but he’s also fundamentally a hypocrite, a fact often pointed out by Dandelion. Geralt goes back and forth between claiming that he won’t intervene or choose the lesser of two evils and doing precisely that. The moral dilemmas he faces in the original stories and his struggle to choose between intervening or not help make him a flexible RPG hero that players can immerse themselves in no matter which choices they make.
Although Geralt has his emotional moments, his generally stoic exterior and outlook also helps the player project their own emotions onto him. In an RPG that degree of projection is vital, and it’s rare to see a protagonist who is both so predefined and so flexible in the way Geralt is.
Finding Geralt's Replacement
Geralt’s success as an RPG protagonist will see CD Projekt Red faced with a problem going forward. Geralt’s replacement will need to be a character who strikes that same balance, feeling well-defined as a character while remaining ambiguous and flexible enough that the different decisions the player can make remain believable. It’s hard to see how that dynamic could be achieved again without CD Projekt Red creating another character who is a stoic like Geralt and has a similar moral code - and willingness to break it.
CD Projekt Red needs to find or create a character who is just as immersive as Geralt without that character feeling like they're just cosplaying as Geralt. This could be tough considering how many of Geralt’s specific personality traits lend to his success as a player character, rather than just a character.
The moral ambiguity of The Witcher’s world could help CD Projekt Red overcome the problem of replacing Geralt to a degree. The stories of characters like The Witcher 3’s Bloody Baron feature so many moral greys that it’s easy to imagine most characters being open to many different decisions when the games present them.
If the new player character isn’t a stoic like Geralt, however, the next Witcher game could struggle to strike the right balance, creating a character who is clearly defined but not interpretable enough to be as successful an RPG hero. For now at least, the future of the Witcher games is up in the air, but if CD Projekt Red can recreate the series’ past success with Geralt it will have done so against the odds.
The next game in The Witcher series is rumored to be in development.