The producer of Netflix's Witcher can blame Americans and young people for its failings all day, but the fact is a no-budget YouTube fan film does it better

pcgamer.com:

When I read that The Witcher's executive producer, Tomek Baginski, had blamed Americans and young people for the show's «painful» simplifications of the source material, I simply shrugged.

Netflix's depiction of Andrzej Sapkowski's fiction is, at times, truncated, tonally different and simplified from the source material (let alone CD Projekt's hugely successful series of The Witcher video games). But is that supposed to be news to people, or something massively unexpected?

Oh come on, it was entirely to be expected, and understandable, too. As soon as The Witcher as a property entered the world of streaming content, where metrics like completion rate are master, the show's makers were always going to have to make a product that would be consumable by the widest spread of people imaginable.

Simplifying the source material may be disappointing for fans of the original fiction, but it doesn't excuse Netflix's The Witcher from delivering a bad show. Indeed, my own personal take on The Witcher TV series is that Netflix's changes have diluted the fiction too much, with it serving up a soap opera take that feels only Witcher-y on the surface and often descends into generic fantasy.

And it appears that the wider audience agrees, with Season 3 of The Witcher currently sitting at a mere 20 per cent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

But, look, it's a mass-market Western TV show version of Sapkowski's Wiedźmin world. All of this was what was most likely to happen. Plus, and here's the kicker, it's not as if there aren't options for people like myself who want a more authentic to the books (and often games, too) watching experience. And I'm not talking about just staring at a picture of Tub Geralt, either. Enter Alzur's Legacy. 

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