We’re in the final span of days before The Witcher returns us to the Continent with another installment — and with the upcoming Season 3 divided into two parts (or “volumes”), it’s all but guaranteed that we’ll be in for a hot Geralt summer. That said, the latest season of the hit Netflix fantasy adaptation brings with it a bittersweet note, given that it was announced back in October that Liam Hemsworth would be replacing Henry Cavill in the role of Geralt of Rivia for Season 4. Although this might be Cavill‘s final bow as the White Wolf and titular witcher, we’ve yet to learn how the show plans to deal with this transition — but fans can also rest secure in the knowledge that showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich already has the next season mapped out.

As part of a junket interview with various members of The Witcher Season 3’s production team, Collider had the opportunity to catch up with concept and production designer Andrew Laws, who has worked on both the flagship series as well as its prequel spinoff, The Witcher: Blood Origin — and dropped a tasty little tidbit for fans who might be wondering what the pre-production status of Season 4 is:

“Obviously, [we’re in the] early stages [and] are meant to be shooting later in the year, but I have all my scripts, so we’ve got a lot to work with. We’re concepting and it’s exciting, it’s really exciting. Particularly off the back of Season 3, we’ve got a lot of shoulders to stand on, so to speak, but we’re well underway.”

‘The Witcher’ Season 3 Relied on Many Different Sets

Of course, before we get too carried ahead thinking about the future, there’s still a lot to be excited about in terms of the show’s impending season. After defeating Voleth Meir and narrowly escaping their first encounter with the Wild Hunt in the Season 2 finale, Geralt, as well as Ciri (Freya Allan) and Yennefer (Anya Chalotra), are now on the run from the various forces that are conspiring to track down Ciri and use her for their own nefarious purposes. That means that there are a lot of different location changes early on, as the trio must always stay one step ahead of their pursuers — and sometimes barely even have a chance to set down roots before they’re inevitably discovered.

Laws explained that this story element was an exciting challenge for the production team, not just for the scenery changes but also for how it allows the characters’ new dynamic to be introduced: “We’re introducing this kind of newly found family, and it’s a much more intimate portrayal of particularly those three characters at the beginning of the season. It’s a sort of more microcosmic way of looking at things.”

That said, there are some stunning locations in Season 3 — not just early on but throughout the season, including the impressive village-sized set that was built as well as the expansion of Aretuza, but Laws elaborated that some of the sets we’ll have the opportunity to see are either built from the ground-up for specific purposes or even designed around structures that already exist:

“It’s an interesting kind of search because, you know, being a period fantasy project, there isn’t a massive amount of available period fantasy locations, particularly with the way we need to interact with them a lot of the time. In the case of the opening segment of Episode 1, we built most of the environment utilizing existing conditions. There was one in particular that had an existing building that worked perfectly for us, and that was really brilliant because it was the right punctuation along that journey. Occasionally, we’re able to find something that really works. We might have to augment it with a bit of physical work or sometimes digitally clean a few things up, but… it is always nice when we’re able to kind of work into something that’s already embedded into the environment.”

Season 3 of The Witcher will be split into two parts, with Volume 1 premiering on Netflix on June 29, with Volume 2 coming to the streamer on July 27.

via Collider