CD Projekt RED has finally announced that the next instalment of The Witcher saga is in development, and the fan theories are already off the chain.
The Polish developer confirmed earlier this week that the new entry is being developed in Unreal Engine 5 in partnership with Epic Games, and that it's definitely not The Witcher 4. That's pretty much all we have to go on, but the teaser image - a witcher medallion buried in the snow - has led to all sorts of speculation.
If you like The Witcher, why not take a look at our super fancy - and extensive - tour of The Witcher 3's Skellige region below?
As I'm sure you know there are - or were - various witcher schools around the world. The last trilogy's protagonist, Geralt of Rivia, belonged to the school of the wolf. But there were also schools for the cat, viper, bear, griffin, crane, and manticore. I should stress that the original Andrzej Sapkowski novels never really made this a focus, but the games lean into it much more.
It was widely assumed that the medallion in the teaser represented the school of the cat, which would have tracked given that Geralt's adopted daughter Ciri carries a cat school medallion and is widely expected to be the protagonist of the new game.
However, others quite rightly pointed out that the medallion didn't really look like the cat school medallion as it appears in The Witcher 3 - it looks more like a Lynx, if anything.
CD Projekt RED has since confirmed this is absolutely the case, revealing that the medallion belongs to the school of the lynx. This is a completely new witcher school that's been created by CDPR specifically for the new game.
"Ok, some mysteries should not be so mysterious," CD Projekt Red global communication director Robert Malinowski told Eurogamer. "I can confirm that the medallion is, in fact, shaped after a lynx."
Of course this only really throws up more questions than answers. Exactly who the school of the lynx are and what they stand for remain a mystery, because they literally did not exist until a few days ago. For now, I'm sticking with my theory that Ciri is building an entirely new school of witchers loosely based on the cat. Will I be wrong? Probably. We'll find out together in the next years.
Topics: The Witcher