"You can't just have Geralt for every single game" says his voice actor, and if you think The Witcher 4 making Ciri the protagonist is "woke," then "read the damn books"

I’m not reading that.

It's how they getcha! That dang "Thinking for themselves!"

Perfection

If Legend of Zelda first came out today, you can bet your ass these people would be complaining about Link not being 'manly' enough.

the massive increase of "woke" by conservative began around the time trumps 1st term, it only amplyfied just befored the pandemic, and during the pandemic. when disney shows, movies, trek made all these right wingers all uncomfortable.

I hope my simple annoyances of painting my nails as a man gives these type of people high blood pressure.

The fucking Secretary of Defense doesn’t wash his hands either

No no o no no no. It's FEMININE to not have shit all over your asshole all the time.

Many diverse characters all fighting back against their unfair economic situation.

"... and that's terrible."

I also remember Portal 2 being on that list for "Most male characters are being depicted as incompetent compared to female characters" or something.

Dude. There are 4 characters in the whole game, counting one that's dead but probably has the most characterization. Two are male. One guy is definitely a moron by design, but the other was definitely not incompetent. Mad, evil, sure. But he certainly achieved stuff.

Woke is now a synonym for Social Justice warrior.

A person or movement prioritizing moralizing outrage about minor grievances over actual effective societal change.

As my half Nigerian cousin likes to say on issues like white people wearing dreadlocks: “That’s something only white privileged women care about.”

I think that ship has sailed. That word is at the moment a clear sign the person using it is an asshole. It can be reclaimed, but right now I don't see that happening.

I would love to not let the nazis dictate how the swastika is used, but their perversion of the original meaning has permanently altered how it's seen by the rest of the world. Claiming the moral high ground by trying to force something to mean what it no longer does is a pointless exercise.

Let Doechii do it for you 😛

"Woke" has had a consistent meaning since its introduction into the English language almost a hundred years ago. It means "Aware of systemic racism."

When blues legend Lead Belly ended a show in 1938 by saying, "Stay woke," he meant: "Stay aware of systemic racism."

When some chud on YouTube in 2025 says "'Woke' is ruining gaming," he means that awareness of systemic racism is ruining gaming. For him.

And when an American politician calls himself "anti-woke", he's saying that he opposes the awareness of systemic racism. Not that he denies the existence of it, but that he'd prefer no one talk about it, so that it can continue.

I was under the impression that it wasn't Victorian London, but The Plague Year. IIRC she, canonically, brings a blanket infested with plague lice from here to there, and ends up dropping it next to the ship Catriona, which is how the Catriona plague actually gets started. It was one of those "oh shit, yes, that explains everything" moments for me when I first read the books.

hold up… ciri fucked a horse?

can you fuck a horse? that was one of the more… questionable scenes in the book.

Uhhh which book is that? If it's the section I'm thinking of with Kelpie the horse, she's entranced by its beauty and it's rider/owner tries to use that to get into her pants (and ultimately died before he was successful) but I don't believe she ever expressed sexual attraction at all to it by my memory from reading the books a couple of months ago.

the party basically needs the woman to proceed. she does not want the child. i believe it was the product of rape. yet for some reason geralt and a literal fucking vampire convince her that abortion is wrong and she should keep it instead of drinking a potion about it

The party is trying to find Ciri after her disappearance. Geralt and Cahir are having visions indicating that she's presently in great danger and suffering (and at that she was!). Finding out while practically at the front lines of the great war that their incredible archer, Milva is pregnant completely derails their entire journey because she can't ride, shouldn't travel, and will need to rest in a safe area for a while (which they are at this point constantly far from anywhere safe), plus they can't exactly bring a baby onto the battlefield they're actively crossing. It's one moral quandry wrapped in another. Ultimately Geralt and Cahir leave it to Milva's decision, as does Regis the barber-surgeon/vampire who created the abortion potion.

Also it wasn't rape. While guiding a group of elves to safety, they hid in a thicket for a night with Nilfgaurdians surrounding them and searching for them. The elves decided that since they were likely to die a horrible death at any moment that they should take the time they have to find what enjoyment they can, and Milva decided to join in. It just so happened they did not die that night and now Milva is carring a halfling for whom she does not know the fathers name (for safety no names were shared with the elves she guided)

i think they generally said that ciri lost her elder blood powers after the king of the hunt was killed right? otherwise I’m gonna be really curious how handle that as well. she should be sort of the world’s greatest sorceress otherwise.

She gave up her magic after trying to use fire as a source of power out of desperation while navigating out of the "Frying Pan" desert. She wanted to save Little Horse the unicorn after an unfortunate battle with a monster she hadn't yet learned of, but no other sources were available. My understanding is fire as a magical source is all consuming so it is forbidden to pull from for safety reasons, but that was largely left up to interpretation.

Upon pulling from fire, she saw the imense power that presented her, the ability to rule the entire world, but also how that would hurt those she cared so deeply about, so she instead gave up her sourceress' powers.

If you want anything to complain about in the books it should be Milva's winging about being an illiterate farm girl that honestly was out of character and just seemed written in so she wouldn't outshine the others

Edit: Cahir's attraction to Ciri is also creepy as hell the way it's written, but that might be intentional, since that's at a point where she's coming to realize that everyone wants something from her, everyone will tell her why she should want to give them what they want from her but nobody ever seems to care or ask what she actually wants.

She's not just the main character towards the end, she is the main character of the story. We play Geralt, who is a side character in Ciri's story.

Someone who can tame unicorns and jump through time and space is much more interesting than a berserker monster slayer.

Yeah, there were a couple of tiny decisions, any of which failed you out if you got them wrong, and several of them had deceptive descriptions during the QTE.

Isn’t the good ending geralt giving her a Witcher blade and calling her an official witcher? That to me sets up part 4. End of the day im glad geralt gets a rest. Besides they’re remaking 1 and 2 so the geralt fix will come

The thing about them is that they are loud, directed, and often affect the first impression a game gets. If this wasn't with The Witcher fame, the effect would be more notable, and oftentimes they don't admit why they really have a problem with the game directly.

Yup, with movies and games alike if it's "woke" and flops they always say that's why, when the truth is it just sucked.

Plenty of American developers are making "woke" games. This isn't a country-specific thing. But in general, yes!

If a game has a non-white or non-male protagonist, it's automatically "woke."

Didn't you hear? Ciri is older and therefore ugly now. The worst offence that a designer could make for a female character.

1. This seems sarcastic. I can tell by the punctuations i am seeing.
2. It's abit gay tho

Have you considered that the comment could, in fact, be a joke?

Yeah. I haven't played 1 much beyond the first 10 minutes, was too janky. 2 was mostly focused on the war, with Geralt being the most important character IMO. In 3 he was no longer THE most important character, but he was a close second - out of a large cast of supporting characters that aided them on the way.

Honestly the longform books take a similar approach, telling several very important people's stories from the perspective of how their stories intertwined with Geralt's and later Ciri's

Also, Tomb Raider. One of the most well known videogame characters is literally an ass-kicking woman.

The main bullshit complaint I've seen about the Horizon games boils down to "Aloy doesn't make my peepee hard". There are dudes out there who only want to see women they can goon to.

have people not played the Horizon games? They’re awesome, they’re fun as hell.

I have actually not. Thank you!

Female protags are rare. They used to be epic loot, but it's getting better now.

I guess it's Portal for me too. Then Oblivion with a female character with that golden armor from shivering isles for shiny boobs. I was a horny teen and porn was getting boring lol

Cranky brooding swordsman is kinda a one trick pony. It's brilliant and hilarious to respond to everything no matter how threatening with just a grunt or dismissive comment, but after 3 major games, it's time for something else

Tomb Raider is not a woman protagonist game though, at least in the first game they wanted to have Indiana Jones but didn't got the rights to it. So the developers replaced the assets with a female.

In whole series there is not much that makes her a woman, more like an American gun-maniac guy that looks like a girl.

Ciri is a Witcher. The Witcher isn't missing at all.

I guess if they didn't read the books, watch the show, or play the most popular and most recent game in the series, then it is fairly reasonable for them to be confused as they won't know shit.

Yeah so others already explained it to you, but I'll give you a quick summary.

Witcher is kind of a job title, but to get in you pretty much join a cult that gives you mutagens that give you cool powers, but also make you infertile and I believe resistant to STDs (this is why Geralt fucks so much).

Ciri trained with the witchers of the Wolf school. I don't remember if she went through the mutations or not, but she has elder blood so she's already more powerful than Geralt. She's part of an end of the world prophecy. She's also essentially Geralt's adoptive daughter.

By the end of Witcher 3, Geralt is getting kind of tired. There's literally no other Witcher in the universe more deserving to be the next lead than the spacetime manipulating princess who doesn't even want to inherit her real father's continent spanning empire because she'd rather be a badass Witcher.

E pluribus anus

Woah... Is that a... A Triple entendre?

Aint us (the original idiom)

They're anuses/assholes/jerks (the pun)

No cheeks, just anus (literal)

Eh, I didn't like Skyrim as much as Morrowind, so I think there's some room for ES6 to improve on ES5.

Oh we will see it ! I'm confident it's going to be shit, but who knows

Although I really liked cyberpunk and I’ve finished both that and Witcher 3 and cyberpunk is my favourite…

Really? I thought Witcher 3 was iconic, like it broke out of the regular gaming culture and into the mainstream, idk if cyberpunk did that.

My world would be better if Witcher 4 is better than 3 but I have doubts

People downvote you but I feel you.

The gameplay just doesn't hold up, the combat is too basic, has no depth and become stale really quickly

Fix two things:

1. The weird loot range issue, where if you’re not standing in juuuuust the right angle, you won’t be able to loot certain corpses or containers.
2. The fact that, outside of combat, controlling Geralt feels like driving a boat. Weird large turn radiuses, slow start and stop, etc… The devs did this to make his movement look more natural, but it feels like the game is constantly fighting against or trying to correct your inputs.

Combine those two things together, and you get a consistently frustrating experience outside of combat. Installing a ranged loot mod was one of the biggest quality of life upgrades. You walk near a corpse or container, and it automatically gets looted.

The combat can also get repetitive at times, and the difficulty scaling is weird too. But as long as those two things and still deliver a good story, I think players will ultimately walk away happy.

Thong customization.

hurls a little in my mouth ROFL I hope not.

This is understandable if someone has a strong gender identity. Most people don't have much of a gender so it's less important to them.

In first person, there is no issue playing a female lead for me. I just have an issue with the common thirst trap design which has been a default design choice in games. As a gay dude, I find that sort of objectification is gross (the same is true for lead men in games. Except in the games that's the point).

Especially when the camera does that pan to that lady lead's ass in third person...Its not the vibe I seek when playing a game. 🙃

Any game with a leading lady that is serving cunt without the objectification I can easily play. Bayonetta is an example of one such game, she's a force of nature, it feels as if she has a strong sense of agency. She's not been made just for the male gaze.

I 100% did, as the weird torture porn-esque deaths bothered me. I could've played if that questionable design choice wasn't made...

Females characters who live independently.

Unless you are also complaining about it when white male characters are also surface-level, 2-D, copy-and-paste characters then all you are saying is "Only white male characters are allowed to be simple or a stereotype/trope." Lets be honest, not every game needs a complex and well written character, and that is fine. If they choose to go that route it doesn't matter what race, religion, or gender the character is in the first place. So it doesn't matter if they are a white male, a latina woman, or a black non-binary person.

Now I'm also not gonna shut down your solution without being constructive and providing my own solution, cause I don't think quotas are the answer either. Instead we should be uplifting and empowering marginalized creators and game designers so that they can make more characters that they want to make. Which is generally characters they can relate to. If people want more characters that are women, then the game industry needs to become a safe space for women and empower them so they can provide more representation for characters. Same thing for any other demographic. That will make sure that these characters are being made in an aethentic and organic way, and not just being pumped out to meet a quota, but also isn't restricting when marginalized demographics can be used as characters.

That's why the trailer has me so hyped for this game. It looks like the game is going to be different because Ciri is the protagonist. Her experience, reactions, and approach to saving a young woman from being sacrificed are totally different than what Geralt's would be. I hate it when games like Mass Effect are like "Oh! You can play as FemShep! That totally counts as representation!" even though it changes literally nothing about the story.

I want more games that actually address the real and significant differences in the experiences and perspectives of different characters. I'm always disappointed when there's a "female" option that's just a re-skin of the male character with no changes in how the character interacts with the world and the story. (This happens a lot in non-video game media too.)

Yeah, I guess as long as there are people that want to hear it, there will be people willing to parrot it.

Yeah and they're all fucking losers, it really feels like the vast majority of people don't care about whatever these online people say 'woke' is. It's the same as complaining about "political correctness gone mad", affirmative action, etc, the same complaints they've had about social progress for decades. Nothing about these youtubers is new or worth dignifying with a response.

Searching for Dustborn on YouTube is the best way to get introduced to those channels.

Journalists can simply assume it's out there, or be even less serious and just bring it up to stir the pot.

With regards to Ciri's age, she's 21 during the main events in The Witcher 3.

At the end of the books she's 17.

No idea if they'll play down the salaciousness or not, but given when the game will likely take place that at least won't be any issues with the main character being a minor.