On The Witcher 3, Race, and Fantasy Homages

This year’s final editorial for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is a piece entitled “On The Witcher 3, Race, and Fantasy Homages” on USGamer that takes a closer look at what the author feels is a perceived lack of minority and female characters in the Nilfgaard Empire while also examining why such oversights may have been made. A couple of paragraphs to begin with:

Can you find room within the text and game for the occasional minority character? Yeah. Nilfgaard is based on the Roman Empire and like that empire, operates by conscripting those it conquers into its highly-trained army. There probably should be a few darker-skinned soldiers in its ranks, coming from the south of the Continent. In the far southeast, there’s an entire race based on Witcher author Andrzej Sapkowski’s mashup of African and Indian culture called the Zerrikanians. They’re generally off on their own, though they’re the origin of the tech behind bombs, which have played a big part in the Witcher’s gameplay. Zerrikanian warriors Tea and Vea were featured in the Sword of Destiny collection and CD Projekt Red featured another, Azar Javed, in the first game.

So yeah, they had opportunity. It would’ve been cool. Despite that, I understand if the combination of Polish author and Polish developer meant their heads were down working on the game and it didn’t come up. Even American studios can miss opportunities for diversity, so devs from a country that’s 97 percent Polish (read: almost all white)? I understand that. They made what reflected their thoughts on The Witcher book, movies, and TV shows. It’s a choice the developer made, but in this case, I don’t fault them for missing the depth of their options.