Witcher 3: four tiers of Witcher armour confirmed, but will you be able to trim Geralt's beard?

S**t's getting real. You may even be able to cut off the ponytail.

"What you should be looking forward to is to assemble special Witcher sets of armour. They're related to the Witcher schools, so the Wolf is not the only one. They come in four different levels, and you can only achieve the highest levels by crafting the previous ones."

Will you be able to cut off Geralt's ponytail in The Witcher 3? We asked CDProjekt Red, because we're games journalisms.

"It will be... we're still considering it," said art producer Stan Just, speaking at gamescom last week. "For example, we heard a lot of things about the hairstyle. A lot of people asked us about the beard and whether it will be trimmable or not. It's still to be decided, but we do hear the voices of the fans."

We're guessing that's a "yes". In the meantime, however, you definitely will be able to customise Mr Witcher with some rad new armour. We already knew there was going to be a bunch of it, but did we know it was going to be tiered Witcher-specific armour related to the four Witcher schools of Wolf, Cat, Griffin and Viper? We didn't.

"What you should be looking forward to is to assemble special Witcher sets of armour," said Just.

"They're related to the Witcher schools, so the Wolf is not the only one. They come in four different levels, and you can only achieve the highest levels by crafting the previous ones.

"That will hopefully engage the players into getting into the quests that'll enable them to gather all of the parts of the set, get the bonus stats and achieve the final stage of the armour. The final stages of those special armours are really, really impressive in terms of artistic style."

Special armour sets are only part of the new customisation options.

"We are making, for example, Witcher armour, Witcher equipment, swords and different items," said Just. "In terms of armour and swords, they're multiplied in amount compared to The Witcher 2. There are several times more."

Customisation is a big theme for The Witcher 3, both in terms of aesthetics and powers. Potions, for example, have been revamped. We asked Just if it was going be easier to mix your brews this time out.

"Yes and no. It's still there, but I guess that it's rather easier this time. It's not that difficult to get what you want. Because of the amount of minor quests and the amount of random encounters, you will find yourself using more consumables than in the previous games. So you probably will learn faster how to use the potions and how to brew them."

And, yes, you can better customise the difficulty this time.

"You can be sure that the game and the difficulty settings will be scalable as much as possible," said Just. "There won't be a God mode in which you're sure that you won't die, but it will be easy enough in the easiest mode so that you will be able to enjoy the story itself, not being harassed by the monsters all the time."

To be honest, you may not want to change too much about it at all, given it looks like this. Watch the gamescom demo in the video below.

The Witcher 3 releases in February for Xbox One, PS4 and PC.