The Witcher 4 will take place in the series’ unnamed Continent, where grass spills over everything like champagne on a tablecloth, like always. But, this time around, players will get to experience brand new regions and nightmare beasts, including one that’s apparently a real bastard.
A “tricky, tricky, tricky bastard” to be exact, according to game director Sebastian Kalemba in a recent interview with Gamertag Radio co-host Parris Lilly. Its name is Bauk, and you’ll find it nestled in one of the “amazing,” “completely new regions” Kalemba hints at to Lilly.
The creature is inspired by Serbian mythology, which tells of a shadowy creature that lives in darkness and wants to eat you. In The Witcher 4, as revealed by the game’s cinematic trailer, Bauk is a gross mess of bone and hair, attacking protagonist Ciri in the misty woods with its unnatural chicken arms.
“Fate cannot be changed,” it pronounces as if gagging, its skin stretched tight over its beak, threatening to pop Ciri’s eye out.
Appropriately, Kalemba tells Lilly that this version of Bauk “plays with your own fears,” and says he loves that aspect of the monster encounter.
“When you look at The Witcher, the way we dealt with the word ‘monster,’ we deal with it in a completely different perspective since The Witcher 1,” Kalemba continues. Initially in the series, you had to “deal with a regular monster, then you had humans that behave monstrously. Then, here, you have inner demons that you have to fight first to be able to finally spot [Bauk] and to kill it.”