The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Bringing Ciri to Life

Jakub Szamalek, CD Projekt’s principal writer on The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, recently had a chat with PC Gamer, during which he focused on Ciri and his team’s efforts to properly introduce her to the video game adaptation of the Witcher Saga. Seeing how Ciri is an integral character of the saga who didn’t get any screen time in the two previous games, this wasn’t such an easy task, especially considering her rich backstory. And if you’d like to know what CD Projekt did to work around that, you should check the interview out. An excerpt:

Time is short, even in a 60-plus hour RPG, so the team at CD Projekt Red needed to think carefully about how to introduce Ciri to players elegantly and efficiently. “Ciri has a very rich backstory—a princess, child of Elder Blood, heir to the throne of Nilfgaard, a bandit, a magician,” says principal writer Jakub Szamalek in reference to just some of Ciri’s adventures in the Witcher Saga. They couldn’t impart each of these formative stories, Szamalek says, knowing that it would be a deluge of backstory.

Instead they chose two focuses: her relationship with Geralt and her ability to traverse through space and time. “The former was key to establishing an emotional connection between the player and the character [they were] supposed to chase after for upwards of 60 hours,” Szamalek says. “The latter explained Ciri’s special role in the universe and allowed us to make Geralt’s investigation a little bit more mysterious and convoluted.”

Despite Ciri’s place as the arguable main character of Wild Hunt and the pin on which the plot later turns, Geralt remains the protagonist and, for the majority of the game, the playable character. Sections in which the player takes control of Ciri are few and far between, making them a precious resource for portraying Ciri’s personality outside Geralt’s supervision. “She has a playful, even impish streak Geralt lacks,” Szamalek says. “She’s unimaginably powerful, but at the same time struggles with self-doubt and runs away from her fate.” Each of Ciri’s scenes had to be layered with complex and often conflicting emotions to get across the literal books of backstory that CD Projekt Red didn’t have time to deliver directly. “Conveying all this to the player—subtly, between verses—was one of the biggest narrative challenges we faced.”