The next entry in The Witcher franchise is sure to be an interesting one. On top of the fact that it has been almost a decade since the release of The Witcher 3, CD Projekt Red has come to be defined by a very different sort of game during the 2020s: Cyberpunk 2077. But while the settings, stories, tones, and gameplay of both these IP couldn’t be further apart, they could still cross-pollinate.
Though it is unmistakably CD Projekt Red in some ways, Cyberpunk 2077 is far more akin to a traditional tabletop RPG than The Witcher—a pedestrian observation, considering its source material. But this TTRPG DNA informs many of Cyberpunk‘s fundamentals, including the fact that V’s background, personality, and appearance are defined by the player. This stands in contrast to the player’s relationship with Geralt, which is less collaborative: players can make key choices as Geralt, but they can’t make Geralt himself. In other words, Geralt is a predetermined character, steered slightly by the character rather than birthed from them. But this may all change come The Witcher 4, which many speculate could star a player-created protagonist.
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Not much is known about The Witcher 4 yet, but there is one element of The Witcher 3 that its successor shouldn’t think twice about including.
If The Witcher 4 Has Character Customization, It Should Learn from Cyberpunk 2077
Cyberpunk 2077’s Character Creation Suite Is Top-Notch
There’s definitely room for Project Orion to improve upon Cyberpunk 2077‘s character customization, but as it stands, it’s already well-crafted and multifaceted. It’s easy for players to make an appropriately grimy, edgy, or punk-infused version of V thanks to myriad hair, eye, and face shape options, but also through more lore-specific cosmetic choices, like facial cyberware and intentionally unnatural iris designs.
Perhaps the worst part of
Cyberpunk 2077
‘s character creation is that players will almost never get to see the avatar that they spend so long customizing. Assuming
The Witcher 4
retains the third-person perspective of its predecessors, though, this wouldn’t be an issue.
How The Witcher 4 Can Learn from Cyberpunk 2077’s Character Customization, and Improve Upon It
Cyberpunk 2077‘s character creator is fun, but it’s far from industry-leading. Common avatar customization staples like sliders and body shape modifiers are completely absent, meaning that, regardless of how a given player mixes and matches certain variables, every V will look the same when it comes to things like head shape, height, et cetera.
In a first-person game, these aren’t huge issues, but with The Witcher 4 presumably being third-person, some more in-depth options may be warranted. Facets of body shape, like height, weight, and muscularity, should be alterable through character creation, similar to how they can be personalized in recent games like Dragon Age: The Veilguard. So long as it doesn’t have a detrimental impact on facial animation, more robust facial sliders, impacting details like jaw and brow shape, which were neglected in Cyberpunk 2077, would also be welcome.
Creativity and world-specific options are what The Witcher 4‘s character creation suite could learn from Cyberpunk 2077. It may be unlikely for the game to allow players to take the role of non-human fantasy races, but considering that Witchers undergo a variety of mutations as part of their training, there is definitely room for more outlandish physical features. In-universe mutations like Euphoria are shown to alter Geralt’s appearance, but others, like Mutated Skin, could also be reflected through abject physical changes in this upcoming game.
All of this is to say that there is a precedent for appearance-changing Witcher mutations, which could be a boon for The Witcher 4‘s possible character creation tools, similar to how cyberware serves as the justification for Cyberpunk 2077‘s more fantastical and memorable customization options. If the next Witcher does indeed have character creation, and there’s no telling whether it will, then learning from these strengths and weaknesses of Cyberpunk 2077‘s customization tools seems pertinent.
The Witcher
The Witcher is a 3D action RPG series developed by CD Projekt Red featuring the exploits of Geralt of Rivia. Steeped in fantasy, The Witcher series is based on the books by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski.