The Witcher 3 was nearly called A Time of Axe and Sword

CD Projekt Red once seriously considered calling The Witcher 3 something else entirely—two different titles were in play before the studio landed on Wild Hunt.

In a recent retrospective interview with Eurogamer, Michal Platkow-Gilewski, VP of Communication and PR at CD Projekt Red, revealed that the early working names for the third instalment in The Witcher game series included Northern Lights and A Time of Axe and Sword.

“I liked Northern Lights,” Platkow-Gilewski said. “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.”

And then came the second contender:

“There was also A Time of Axe and Sword, and for a while, this name was going to be the one. 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.”

The reason was simple: it was too much of a mouthful. The studio needed something more evocative, shorter, and more ominous. The moment they hit upon Wild Hunt, they knew it was the one.

Branding the Hunt

When Wild Hunt was finally chosen, it was more than just a catchy name. It directly referenced the terrifying, spectral antagonists that relentlessly hunt Ciri throughout the game. Even without deep familiarity with Witcher 3 lore, the phrase "Wild Hunt" suggested something primal and dangerous, helping players intuit the game’s tone and threat level.

That kind of clarity was crucial in 2013. At the time, the Witcher series wasn’t yet a household name. The first two games had sold about five million units combined. The Netflix show didn’t exist. Andrzej Sapkowski's books, while respected in European fantasy circles, hadn’t reached mainstream global audiences.

That meant The Witcher 3 needed to speak to new players just as much as it appealed to longtime fans. One issue they faced: the “3” in the title.

Would newcomers be turned off by the idea that they had to play the first two games to understand the story?

The studio decided to tweak the game’s logo mid-marketing campaign. Instead of the number “3,” the branding used three claw-like marks, referencing the helmet of Eredin, the Wild Hunt’s leader.

“We decided, in the middle of the campaign, with all the questions of like, ‘Should I play? Do I have to play?’ That we should turn the three into these marks from Eredin’s helmet in the centre of the logo,” Platkow-Gilewski explained.

It worked. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt went on to sell over 60 million copies, becoming one of the best-selling RPGs of all time and defining the open-world fantasy genre for a generation.

Would a different name have changed anything?

Looking back, it’s hard to imagine the game being called anything else. Wild Hunt now feels inseparable from Ciri’s flight, Geralt’s battles, and the existential dread of the White Frost. The phrase “Time of Axe and Sword” sounds more like a subtitle from the books or a lore supplement. “Northern Lights” evokes Scandinavia or sci-fi, not doomed monarchs and spectral riders.

What if CDPR had stuck with one of those? Would the game still have become a classic? Maybe. But it likely would have taken longer to get there.

Here’s Sapkowski’s Witcher Series – Original Books Overview:

As the studio celebrates 10 years of The Witcher 3, attention is shifting toward The Witcher 4, which is officially in development. The next game will star Ciri as the main protagonist—something fans of the lore have long speculated about, and something Geralt’s English voice actor, Doug Cockle, has vocally supported.

Not everyone is on board with that shift, but it marks a new era for the franchise—one that returns to the original source material while also forging ahead with its own narrative direction.

Until then, Wild Hunt remains the benchmark. And we now know it came very close to being something else entirely.