The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt nearly had a very different name

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…”

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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.