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The Witcher 4 reveal at the 2024 Game Awards was a very big deal, and appropriately the trailer setting the stage for CD Projekt‘s next big adventure was long and elaborate, offering a look at Ciri’s complicated life on the path. In a video released today, CD Projekt served up a behind-the-scenes look at the trailer’s creation, which was itself a long and elaborate process that among other things required a whopping 14 days of mocap.
There’s a lot to see in the video, from the themes CD Projekt aims to embrace in the new Witcher game to the mechanics of bringing the monstrous bauk to life, a process that involved four operators swinging around a physical mockup of the creature’s shoulders and arms. “On the screen, we saw in real-time a moving bauk,” stunt coordinator Maciej Kwiatkowski says. “We created a witcher-style sequence, just practiced it a couple times—we practiced how to move the bauk, how to synchronize—and it worked. It worked beautifully.”
On top of the 14 days of mocap, the team spent three days with rented movie gear, gathering “lots and lots of shots with different features on them like distortions, lens flares, bloom, how the bauk head behaves,” which it then used to create digital representations of the camera lenses in the game engine.
The video wraps up by touching on the trailer’s narrative, which is “an adaptation of the story that we actually want to tell in the game,” narrative director Philipp Weber says. “We’re not going to give you a black or white situation. We expect you to consider some situations, make some tough choices, and as an example, the situation that may happen after the trailer is over.”
Sometimes I feel like The Witcher can be a little too dark for its own good (which I think may be one of the reasons the Blood and Wine expansion is so brilliant—Geralt finally catches a break) and there was never any doubt that The Witcher 4 reveal trailer was going to end badly. But what comes after all that? The “proper” witcher response is to take the money and walk away—”Don’t get involved,” as Vesemir would sagely advise—but Ciri’s menacing “There are no gods here, there are only monsters” line is a pretty clear callback to The Witcher 3’s “Killing Monsters” cinematic, in which Geralt does get involved, and some Nilfgaardian troops pay for it. Could Ciri pull her own Butcher of Blaviken on the villagers? That certainly seems to be the implication, which opens a door to some very interesting questions about what might come after that—and how Geralt (or others) might handle it if it comes to their attention.
Answers are still a long way off: The Witcher 4 doesn’t have anything remotely resembling a release target at this point, but given that all we’ve seen of it so far is this one cinematic, I’m pretty sure we’ve got quite a wait yet.
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Kurt Indovina
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