Summary
One of the key concerns fans have withThe Witcher 4is how it will reconcilethe different endings from the last game. Ciri either becomes a witcher, returns to Nilfgaard to prepare for her ascension to the throne, or ‘dies’. You can’t have all three be true.
Past Witcher games imported your choices likeDragon Age.
From everything we’ve seen so far, it looks like CDPR’s answer to these vastly different branches is to simply choose a canon ending — Ciri becomes a witcher. It’s hard to imagine a Witcher game centred on the politicking of an Empress, rather than, well, witcher-ing, so it makes sense that CDPR would go with the most popular of the three.
But one fan looked to the studio’s other work for a better solution.
u/Micheo33 shared a mock-up of ‘Ciri’s Lifepath’, based on the various origins fromCyberpunk 2077, which shaped not only V’s backstory, but also dialogue options and certain quests throughout the game. Instead of Nomad, Streetkid, and Corpo, Ciri’s options are:
Moribund simply means ‘at the point of death’, alluding to the ‘bad’ ending in which Ciri… well, dies. At least, that’s how it looks. In reality, she escaped and chose not to return to Geralt after he strained their relationship to its breaking point. you may just make out a tiny bird flying away from the tower in the final tapestry, vaguely resembling a swallow. And as you might know,Ciri’s name Zireael means Swallow in elvish.
This theory was confirmed by CPDR to be the game’s final secret. So, we know that Ciri survived all three endings, which means that an origin system like Cyberpunk 2077’s could work. The issue ishowshe became a witcher in the Moribund and Empress paths.
How Can Ciri Be Empress And Witcher?
In the ‘bad’ ending, it’s possible that after narrowly avoiding death and fleeing from Geralt and Nilfgaard alike, another school allowed her to go through the trials and mutations to become a witcher.
Author and creator Andrzej Sapkowski said thathe never wrote that women couldn’t go through the mutations.
The Empress ending takes a bit more finagling, but itcouldwork. As u/Seraphem666 pointed out, in the Blood and Wine expansion, “she explains [that] she is being groomed for the role,” so it’s possible that she just wasn’t cut out to be the Nilfgaardian Empress and ended up becoming a witcher anyway. Others have suggested that she could’ve been overthrown in a coup, or that Emyr’s political rival “blocked her from taking the throne” in the first place.
But as some commenters point out, even if CDPR found a way to make the endings organically reach the same place, Cyberpunk 2077’s beginnings were criticised for being too short, and didn’t have nearly as much impact on the wider story as people expected. So, just how impactful a similar system would be in The Witcher 4 is dubious.
