Did you know there are whales in The Witcher 3? Well there are and they’re huge.
Sometime yesterday, a prolific YouTuber, who goes by the name Blah Blah, uploaded one of the strangest gameplay videos of The Witcher 3 I’ve ever seen. Geralt appears to be walking along the top of a tower for the Beyond Hill and Dale mission in Blood and Wine when a humpback whale comes plunging out of the sky. CD Project Red’s game is no stranger to glitches. It takes place in a massive open world with tons of interlocking NCPs and quests, so naturally the fabric of space time is bound to breakdown at one point or another.
But damn! A whale?
I’ve somehow played through hundreds of hours of The Witcher 3 without ever encountering one of its massive sea creatures. Sure, I’ve fought more than my fair share of Sirens, but outside of a few treasure chests and ship wrecks, I never found anything of much interest while sailing past the shores of the game’s Viking-inspired islands.
But it turns out that whales really are a thing in The Witcher 3. A big thing.
It turns out that Kotaku’s own Kirk Hamilton actually mentioned the existence of whales in the game back during a preview from GDC 2015. Screenshots of the game showed Geralt in a boat and a whale flipping its tale up as it dove into the water. “You’ll definitely be able to control the boat, though you won’t get to fight the whales,” Kirk wrote at the time. “They’ll be more of a hazard you’ll have to avoid. Aw. I was hoping for next-gen whaling gameplay.”
There’s even a Wiki entry for Witcher 3 whales that states, among othere things, that the “Bones from them are used to build huts in case of the unavailability of wood.” Who knew?
Sucks, who uploaded the video to Reddit and appears to be the original owner said the glitch happens every time. In fact, speculation in the thread at least is that it’s not a glitch at all, but rather a reference to Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The scene from the first book, which was also depicted in the movie, talks about a whale appearing above the planet Magrathea,
“Another thing that got forgotten was the fact that against all probability a sperm whale had suddenly been called into existence several miles above the surface of an alien planet.”
The whale eventually plummets to earth, just like the one in Blah Blah’s video. It’s a meditation on the meaning of life—or lack thereof. What it would mean in the context of The Witcher 3, on the other hand, is anybody’s guess. Perhaps the poor thing looked something like this when all was said and done.