The Witcher 4 is coming! Sorry, I meant that initial confirmation of the next saga in The Witcher franchise is coming! Let’s not get carried away with attaching numerical quantifiers to our video games now, once we start calling the fourth Witcher game The Witcher 4 society will inevitably begin to fall apart.

Besides, I imagine CD Projekt Red has a fairly good reason for this, likely poised to begin an entirely new series of titles that have little to do with Geralt of Rivia. I’m excited, but I hope it makes some much-needed changes in how it has long depicted certain characters.

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Whether The Witcher 4 (I’m sorry I can’t help it) follows Ciri on a bespoke adventure or seeks to depict an entirely new world and cast of characters, I hope it takes a step to address its aggressively heteronormative relationship with women. Ever since the first game, female characters in the series have often been seen as sexual objects, eventual conquests for Geralt to pursue that will result in a sex scene that feels very vintage BioWare. Good job you followed through on the questline, now it’s time for some tiddies.

The Witcher

Now I love some tiddies, don't get me wrong, but The Witcher has always felt like it was designed by white men with a conventional idea of attraction and how that will appeal to a certain demographic. It’s true that Triss and Yennefer are both excellent and empowering characters in their own right, and have fascinating stories to tell throughout the entire trilogy. Their personalities are so different too, offering varied perspectives on the conflicts engulfing this fantasy world and why coming together with Geralt to form an uneasy alliance is the best way forward. But intricate development aside, the conversation online often boils down to a binary choice that defines these two women as objects - Triss or Yennefer?

Games as a whole should move on from this perspective. There is nothing wrong with romance or even sex in an RPG, especially if it feels like a natural climax for a specific character arc or informs the overall narrative. Romantic partners in RPGs are popular in games like this because we love growing close to characters, finding those who gel with what we find attractive in reality and cementing them as firm favourites. It’s why I was so close with Liara in Mass Effect or Emily in Stardew Valley. While they might be virtual, relationships like this are real enough to form cultures outside of games themselves that live on in fanart, fanfics, and theories that show how much power shipping has.

The Witcher

But The Witcher feels juvenile at points, eager to throw a mandatory sex scene in front of us where the entire focus is on women who are framed in such an exhaustingly heteronormative way. There’s also the problem of almost all the female characters in Wild Hunt having the exact same body type. Slender, attractive, lithe, and ready to pose for the camera. There is no way Triss or Yennefer are comfortable in some of the clothes they’re wearing, and I can’t imagine Ciri’s outfit will do her many favours in battle. But she looks pretty, so it’s fine.

There’s one scene in Wild Hunt that always rubbed me the wrong way. After suffering from an attack Ciri awakens in a village and is raised back to health by its inhabitants. One scene has all of you taking to a local bath, with the game giving us an option to strip off or keep our bandages on to preserve some modesty. Ciri is a relatively shy and reserved character, but the game still views her body as a sexual object despite being a surrogate daughter to our main character. It feels icky, and much like Cyberpunk 2077, CDPR views the sheer presence of nudity and sex as a mark of its own maturity. Just because your game is willing to subject female characters to titillation doesn’t make you worthy of admiration, it’s the basest form of adult entertainment that could be so much more if our relationship with it wasn’t so surface level.

The Witcher

I remember stumbling across Keira Metz for the first time and being in awe at her outfit. One of our first encounters involves peeking at her in the bath, the camera soaring past a pair of shagging rabbits to really hammer the point home that this game is proper horny. When she steps out in clothes, I can’t help but notice her top is undone to show just a smidge of nipple. It was likely intended to show that Keira is aware of how attractive she is and can use that asset to have men abide by her whims. This attitude can be expressed without a cheeky nip slip, it can be done through dialogue and actions just as well. Characters like Keira, Ciri, Triss, and Yennefer are so vastly different, but their body types all seek to appeal to the same generic level of attraction. Straight dudes think we’re gorgeous and that’ll do.

The Witcher 4 - or whatever it ends up being called - needs to update its fantasy world to reflect a more diverse and inclusive populace. We’ve seen this with Mass Effect Andromeda, Horizon Forbidden West, and other games in recent years, all games that showcase the vast spectrum of attraction games are capable of without devolving them down to predictably dry sex scenes. Women can be beautiful whether they’re short, tall, slim, fat, or anywhere in between, and by labelling sex appeal to a single archetype you’re only highlighting how behind the times you really are. Gaming has moved on, but The Witcher hasn’t.

The Witcher

I know this article is going to have me labeled as a founding member of the Woke Brigade, demanding that our favourite games be filled with mandatory diversity in order to stop me crying myself to sleep. But it doesn’t even feel like a demand, it feels like what games should strive to be and the more we refuse to acknowledge that the more tiresome this medium becomes. The Witcher is a rightfully beloved franchise, with Wild Hunt being one of the finest RPGs in recent memory for so many reasons. Despite this reverence, its view of women as sexual objects with magazine cover star body types feels so stuck in the past. I hope this changes in the next game, since we would be so much better for it.

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