CD Projekt Red has confirmed the medallion featured in its new Witcher game tease is from a new School of the Lynx, which will seemingly be invented for the new game.
Speaking to Eurogamer, the developer’s global communication director Robert Malinowski confirmed that the medallion isn’t from any currently canon witcher school. “Some mysteries should not be so mysterious”, he said. “I can confirm that the medallion is, in fact, shaped after a lynx.”
The previous game’s protagonist, Geralt, is from the School of the Wolf, his witcher guild, and the other schools are the Cat, Griffin, Bear, Viper, Manticore, and Crane.
The School of the Lynx is therefore a brand new school that CD Projekt Red is creating for The Witcher 4 (for lack of an official name). This isn’t particularly unusual in itself, as Andrzej Sapkowski’s original book series only feature the Wolf, Cat, and Griffin schools, and CD Projekt has previously invented others.
While there’s no official School of the Lynx in the books or games, a popular Witcher fan fiction features the guild in a story based on other existing Witcher characters Lambert and Keira Metz. There’s no word on whether CD Projekt Red was influenced by any of these stories though, meaning the announcement of a brand new school essentially sends theorists back to step one.
The internet was sent into a frenzy when CD Projekt Red made the game announcement on March 21, with fans left debating whether Ciri might be the main character of the new game. The School of the Lynx confirmation doesn’t dispel this idea, as while Ciri already wears a School of the Cat medallion one could, for obvious reasons, lead to the other.
Another theory, on the other hand, is now less likely. The teased medallion looked a like fan favourite character, Vesemir’s medallion from Netflix’s Witcher anime film: Nightmare of the Wolf, but now that it’s confirmed not to be a wolf, there’s little to suggest the new game will involve Vesemir, especially as he died during the course of the last game.
The new Witcher game was teased just a few hours after a fan potentially found The Witcher 3’s final secret, but CD Projekt Red didn’t say much else except that the game will run in Unreal Engine 5.
It’s director, Jason Slama, commented that he won’t allow crunch under his watch, addressing concerns that staff would be forced to work under tough conditions as they did with Cyberpunk 2077.
CD Projekt Red last released a mainline Witcher game with Wild Hunt’s release in 2015, but has since released Cyberpunk 2077, The Witcher Tales: Thronebreaker, and Gwent. IGN recently gave The Witcher 3 a top spot on our best open world games of all time and in our 9/10 review said “massive in size and meticulously detailed, The Witcher 3 ends Geralt’s story on a high note.”
Joe Skrebels is IGN’s Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.