The Witcher author Andrzej Sapkowski has discussed a key plot point in the video game series that was actually a mistake in his novels, but “video game people have clung to the idea with remarkable tenacity”.
Sapkowski took part in a reddit AMA yesterday, where one user asked for his thoughts on the additional Witcher schools added to the games.
“The issue of ‘witcher schools’ requires – I apologise – a longer explanation,” Sapkowski began. “A single sentence about some ‘school of the Wolf’ mysteriously made its way into The Last Wish. I later deemed it unworthy of development and narratively incorrect, even detrimental to the plot. Therefore, later I never included or referenced any Witcher Gryffindors or Slytherins again. Never.
“However, that one sentence was enough. Adaptors, particularly video game people, have clung to the idea with remarkable tenacity and have wonderfully multiplied these ‘witcher schools’. Completely unnecessary.”
Sapkowski added he was “uncertain about what to do with this situation”, and provided a couple of suggestions without confirming which route he’ll take.
The path of least resistance, he said, would be to remove the sentence in future editions of The Last Wish, but he may also “expand and clarify the matter somehow in subsequent books”. He continued: “Perhaps I’ll shed some light on the issue of Witcher medallions, their significance, and their connection to specific individuals? There are many possibilities, and the sky is the limit.”
The idea of Witcher schools certainly appears core to CD Projekt Red’s forthcoming The Witcher 4. The game was first teased with an image of a medallion, which the studio later confirmed was shaped after a lynx. This led fans to believe the game would focus on Ciri and a new Witcher school of the Lynx.
Sapkowski was also asked for his thoughts more broadly on adaptations of his work (like the games and Netflix’s TV series), which he believes are inherently inferior.
“I’ll put it this way: there’s the original and then there are adaptations,” he said. “Regardless of the quality of these adaptations, there are no dependencies or points of convergence between the literary original and its adaptation. The original stands alone, and every adaptation stands alone; you can’t translate words into images without losing something, and there can’t be any connections here.
“Moreover, adaptations are mostly visualisations, which means transforming written words into images, and there is no need to prove the superiority of the written word over images, it is obvious. The written word always and decidedly triumphs over images, and no picture – animated or otherwise – can match the power of the written word.”
Elsewhere, Sapkowski doesn’t listen to the “Toss a Coin to Your Witcher” song very often as he’s “not particularly susceptible to songs”. And his favourite dinosaur is a Pterodactyl.
A tech demo for The Witcher 4 was shown earlier this year at the State of Unreal stream, though CDPR later confirmed this was simply a tech demo and wouldn’t necessarily be indicative of the final game.
