The Witcher 4‘s first trailer reveal showed us Ciri will be the open-world RPG’s next main protagonist, but that doesn’t mean her mentor and surrogate father figure, Geralt of Rivia, won’t be joining her on her new adventures in some way. What exact role he’ll play, however, remains a secret.
“Geralt will appear in the game, but we don’t want to spoil his role precisely,” CD Projekt Red told IGN. “You’ll have to wait to learn more for now.” Doug Cockle, who voiced the character in the first three games, will also be back with his uniquely gruff and sardonic delivery. The actor had previously teased his involvement in The Witcher 4, only to try to walk that back as pure speculation after getting a talking to from CDPR.
While The Witcher 4 trailer doesn’t show Geralt at all, we do here him in a voiceover at the very end. “Time for a new saga,” he says. “See you on the path.” So what can fans expect from the wizened witcher in the sequel? Will he be a brief cameo, or actually be available to fight alongside Ciri in one or more quests as Vesemir, Geralt’s mentor, did in The Witcher 3?
Without giving anything away, CDPR’s developers point to the white wolf’s ongoing adventures in Andrzej Sapkowski’s books for clues. “Geralt will probably be around for a long time,” lore designer Cian Maher told IGN. “In [prequel novel] Season of Storms, there is an epilogue. It takes place in Magpie Forest in 1373, 101 years after The Witcher 3. And in that epilogue there is a certain white-haired Witcher hunting a monster who remains unnamed, but who behaves in a certain way.”
He continued cryptically, “And obviously he has white hair. I think we can expect Geralt to be around for a long time. The capacity in which he does is…we’ll see. But I don’t think he’s going anywhere.”
The Witcher 4 probably still won’t be out for a while, but in the meantime fans can get more of Cockle’s Geralt in Netflix’s animated movie The Witcher: Sirens of the Deep that arrives in February 2025. Author Sapkowski also recently finished the first new Witcher novel in over a decade. And English translation is expected sometime next year as well.
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