CD Projekt Red Accused Of Paying Bots To Defend 'The Witcher 4'
YouTuber Aydin Paladin accused CD Projekt Red of paying bots to defend The Witcher 4.
In a post to X, Aydin Paladin wrote, “I have become 100% convinced that CDPR has paid for a bot farm to spam the same talking points regarding [The Witcher 4]. I've pointed out before that there's about 5 seemingly scripted responses to ANY critique of what we know about the game, but here it is overtly.”
“I say nothing about her being a Witcher (she's not and cannot be) and instead just say I don't want to play a game where you go around as Ciri trying to not get raped in a war-torn Continent, as happens in the books, and the NPC just starts talking about her being a Witcher and how I'm a fake fan in a complete non sequitur. I refuse to believe these are real humans,” she added.
Paladin then shared an example of an interaction with X user subataxia92. Paladin commented on a Pirat_Nation post, “The books portray the gritty, dark nature of warfare in horrifying detail, including Ciri being nearly raped on multiple occassins while she and Geralt are separated. I don’t wanna play a game about that.”
The X user replied, “Depriving Ciri of any part of the story? Read the books. She doesn’t take the trial of the grasses but considers herself a Witcher in the end and is more powerful than any Witcher. Don’t tell me you liked W3 and acted like this, because a certain ending literally makes her a Witcher.”
In a subsequent post, she added, “CD Projekt Red, maybe put some instruction into your bots to not respond to a woman saying she doesn’t want to play a game where the female protagonist has to avoid getting harassed or raped with the same f***ing scripts of ‘read the books’ and ‘she’s a Witcher’”
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Paladin’s accusation comes in the wake of intense backlash against CD Projekt Red’s decision to make Ciri, a witcher who undertook The Trial of the Grasses, in The Witcher 4.
The game’s Executive Producer Małgorzata Mitręga confirmed this decision to IGN telling the outlet, “That was a huge thing for us, to make that call [to mutate Ciri], not only for her, but for the game. But then it's so important and still leaves so much space for imagination, like when it happened, how it happened. It's just a tease showing something, but you don't know where you will experience it and how in the game. I think it's a huge change and I hope people did not expect it.”
IGN also reported that Game Director Sebastian Kalemba informed them that she underwent the Trial of the Grasses as well. IGN’s Matt Purslow reported, “Kalemba explains that, following the events of The Witcher 3, Ciri has undertaken the famously painful Trial of the Grasses which has mutated her into a powerful and resilient warrior.”
This backlash was addressed on multiple occasions by both Kalemba and Mitrega as well as Narrative Director Philipp Weber.
In an interview with Eurogamer, Weber stated, “I think there's many very valid worries and responses, because I think a lot of them come out of passion, and I think a lot of those questions are also questions that we asked ourselves. So we really, again, say that we are beholden to the lore, the canon of the books by Andrzej Sapkowski, the three previous Witcher games, and we'd want to take that seriously, and we really want to respect that. So all the answers we basically want to give in The Witcher 4 are in line with this attitude.We're not suddenly making up stuff just because we want to. We really want to take these things seriously.”
“So I can really understand if some people, you know, might have wished to play another game with Geralt - like I can say myself, I could make games about Geralt until the day I die, and I would probably die happy. But I think for me, and I think for all of us [at CDPR], it's also just really exciting to see all the opportunities that Ciri brings us, both with her character, and also by just virtue of who she is, what we can do with her in terms of the gameplay as well,” he added. “So I think the best answer for us, for those people that really are worried right now, is basically to show them, when we are ready, that we really do this well and with care. And I think - I hope - we can then convince them with the game itself. Because I think actions speak louder than words.”
Kalemba also answered, “Yeah, well said. And on top of that, just please remember that we are also not only developers, but we are also gamers, right? And, you know, we've started with the second protagonist already in The Wild Hunt. And so there was already a tease. So we really [are] all about making sure such calls are very educated calls. And we really believe, as Philip already said, that we also have so much of a great story to tell with Ciri, and she deserves that.”
In an interview on the Skill Up YouTube channel, Mitrega also stated, “I already read the comments that people are afraid of, ‘if you go to everybody it will be a mix, do we still got it?’ So you need to trust. We are storytellers. This is our priority always. And we go in-depth with that. We are going with the universal experience of the storytelling and she is just a character that will give us more opportunity to do that.”
“And, yes, we want to go to both players that know us already and for the new audience because you can start the game without having any knowledge actually about the previous [games] even about the world. You can just start it as a new entering and it will be an introduction to The Witcher world. So it’s totally fine. You can, of course, go back to The Witcher after. But I think that we do have an idea for that, you just have to wait to experience that,” she concluded.
Kalemba added, “I can even add just to calm some people down is that we trust the process. We are storytellers. The most important thing and I believe you can experience this in the trailer is that the very core motivation behind making this trailer was actually to make it in a way that you will care. That you will at some point care about Mioni, about Ciri, about this final feeling of, ‘oh my god, I did my best but I couldn’t control everything. Dumb people followed by superstitions. Bloody hell. And then I couldn’t save her.’ This is the way. We trust the process. We make emotions. We pay so much respect to characters we create. We make them believable alive. Characters that will stay with you forever. So those are like real people. This is the way we make stories.”
He then reiterated, “So I can calm everyone down here there’s going to be an amazing story had and we’ve created emotional stakes that are not coincidental whatever, very well thought out.”
What do you make of Paladin’s accusation that CD Projekt Red is using bots to defend The Witcher 4?
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