„True Geralt is supposed to be ugly and inhuman!” The Witcher devs needed a shake-up to give the White Wolf the right look
Geralt in The Witcher 2 was supposed to be given a completely new face. However, the community reacted so negatively that the developers held off their decision and returned to the character from the first installment.
Starting work on the second Witcher, CD Projekt RED decided to completely refresh Geralt's face. In 2010, when the new design was revealed, players didn't like it at all. The studio had to backtrack and go back to the original look of the character from the first game.
Geralt's new face
Pawel Mielniczuk, the Art Director of CD Projekt RED, recently recalled that situation in a conversation with Eurogamer. The desire to change the face resulted, among other things, from switching to a completely new engine. The Witcher 2 abandoned BioWare technology - Aurora Engine - and used the proprietary REDengine.
Mielniczuk itted that the strong stylization of The Witcher 1 was an issue. The game had simpler graphics, so Geralt looked good in it, but he wasn't very anatomically correct.
When we got to The Witcher 2, we had a better engine - larger budgets for polygons, more artists to sculpt nice faces, and we actually got better at making characters, already being a studio that released one game. And Geralt's [existing] face just did not match the style of the rest of the characters. It was not realistic human proportions.
Geralt's new face. CD Projekt RED
We could see the results of our work in the first set of screenshots from The Witcher 2. However, the community was strongly dissatisfied with the new look of the Monster Slayer, as Mielniczuk put it, it simply "crushed the studio on the forums." Fans claimed that the "real Geralt should be ugly and inhuman."
CD Projekt RED therefore decided to make another change - the protagonist's face ultimately became a "hybrid of Geralt from The Witcher 1 and a real man."
How was it in The Witcher 3?
In the case of The Witcher 3, we can immediately notice that Geralt's face doesn't differ much from the one in the second installment of the series. Although the opportunity for change arose, the studio decided to use the same model.
With The Witcher 3, we actually used exactly the same model from Witcher 2, added more polygons, updated textures, but we did not touch it.
According to Mielniczuk, Geralt's face has certain elements that he would personally like to change. One of the bigger problems is his simple nose.
If you look at the profile of Geralt: he has this incredible profile but the tip of his nose is a completely straight line from his forehead, kind of Greek proportions, and it was not fitting his face, so we wanted to fix that. But we did not. We made a decision, 'Okay, that's Geralt, he's recognisable, people are loving our character. We . We cannot make this mistake once again.'
Right now, The Witcher 4 is in development, which will use the completely new Unreal Engine 5. This gives the devs the possibility to change Geralt's face again. However, it seems that this will not happen, because as Mielniczuk says, this is "such a deeply grounded character that he would not dare to touch him." Only textures or details can be updated, but the overall anatomy and proportions should remain the same.
However, there is one thing that could tempt Mielniczuk to redesign Geralt's face - scans of Henry Cavill, the actor known for playing the witcher in the Netflix series. The developer seems to be his huge fan (like we all).
Henry was just perfect. If I would do something to the face, I would be easily convinced to scan Henry and put him in The Witcher 4!
