There was a time when The Witcher 3 wasn’t called Wild Hunt and CD Projekt Red was trying out various names for its new game – and we’ve just unearthed a couple we’d never heard before.
“I liked Northern Lights,” Michal Platkow-Gilewski, vice president of communication and PR, told Eurogamer. “For a moment there was The Witcher 3: Northern Lights. It never made it into even a logo design but on the whiteboard, for a while, it was there.”
There was also, he revealed, A Time of Axe and Sword, and he said that for a while, this name was going to be ‘the one’. However, it’s a bit of a mouthful to say.
“Yes!” Platkow-Gilewski said, speaking as part of an interview for a larger article looking back on 10 years of The Witcher 3, which we’ll publish tomorrow. “That’s why it died pretty fast. But I remember I created a doc with the final name and that was the final name, and with some colleagues we were betting how long it would last.
“It didn’t last long,” he added. “So we were toying with the name but the moment we found Wild Hunt…”
The moment the studio tried “Wild Hunt”, the name fit. It not only directly referenced the titular threat of the Wild Hunt in the game – the phantasmal group of riders which relentlessly pursues Ciri – but it, regardless of whether you knew the lore or not, left a strong impression of what the game might be about.
That was a big concern for CD Projekt Red at the time: bringing new players in. Remember back in 2013, far fewer people knew about The Witcher games, the studio making them, or the The Witcher lore – those books written by Andrzej Sapkowski. The two released Witcher games only had a cumulative 5 million sales at that point, which is an order of magnitude less than the 60 million copies The Witcher 3 has now sold. There was no Netflix Witcher TV show, either.
That number 3 in the game’s title was a potentially off-putting thing for a prospective audience, then. Would people who hadn’t played the other two games feel like they needed to in order to enjoy this? It’s for precisely this reason the game’s logo changed mid-campaign, switching from displaying an actual number 3 to displaying three claw-like slash marks instead. “We decided, in the middle of the campaign, with all the questions of like, ‘Should I play? Do I have to play?’ that we should turn the three into these marks from Eredin’s helmet in the centre of the logo,” Platkow-Gilewski said.
Today, 10 years later, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is the name in our heads. The question is, would a different name have had any effect on the legacy it left?
We also now look forward to a new Witcher game, The Witcher 4, which is in full development although not likely to be released until after 2026. The new game will star Ciri as its protagonist, moving her into a central role after being the co-protagonist, of sorts, in The Witcher 3. It’s a decision that’s met some resistance but one the game’s makers, and people such as Geralt’s English language voice actor Doug Cockle, have openly and vocally stood behind.