Partway through The Witcher 3, two characters had a conversation that got my head spinning.
Heads up! Some plot spoilers for The Witcher 3 follow. Nothing too major, but if you want to experience the game totally fresh, better to steer clear.
Everyone still here?
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Here we go.
After the lengthy first act of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Geralt and his adopted daughter Ciri are reunited. They haven’t seen one another for several years, and they spend a nice fireside chat catching up.
Ciri is possessed of a type of magical blood that gives her the ability to open doors between worlds, teleporting to mysterious alternate dimensions at will. As the two reminisce, she says that she spent a significant portion of their time apart—half a year—hiding in one particular world that sounds… interesting.
“People there had metal in their heads,” she says. “Waged war from a distance, using things similar to megascopes. And there were no horses, everyone had their own flying ship instead.”
The minute Ciri mentioned people with metal in their heads, my ears perked up. The minute she mentioned flying ships, my eyebrows perked alongside them. Could she be talking about… Witcher-developer CD Projekt Red’s other big upcoming game, Cyberpunk 2077?
The Megascope reference is interesting. In The Witcher lore, megascopes are magical devices that Sorceresses use to communicate with one another across vast distances, among other things. In The Witcher 2, a sorceress named Síle de Tansarville used one that looked like three crystals arranged in a standing triangle, but the game also featured a prototype megascope that looked like this (via CJake3):
“Things similar to megascopes” could be anything, then, from a digital communications device to some sort of cybernetic implant. To, yeah, something that has nothing to do with Cyberpunk 2077 at all.
As Wild Hunt’s story goes on, we learn about a few other alternate dimensions, but aside from the one that directly involves The Wild Hunt, none are described with the kind of detail that Ciri includes in that first conversation with Geralt. She spent six months there, too, so she wasn’t just passing through.
So! Any chance that when Cyberpunk 2077 finally comes out, we’ll run across a certain white-haired warrior lady in hiding? I have no idea if that’s how it’ll play out, but I could definitely see it happening. Or not.
I asked CD Projekt Red if they could shed any light on the matter, and here’s what one of their representatives said:
Hi Kirk,
Well... no comments.
And that concludes today’s crackpot Witcher + Cyberpunk theory.
To contact the author of this post, write to kirk@kotaku.com.