slimgrin said:
Hmm..I thought it was Ignii because it looked so much like Ignii does in the game.
Geralt's face looks different in the opening movie than it does in the game, so the signs look a bit different, too. They wanted to make the sign look dramatic, so they needed it to be a more visible effect than Aard usually is.
I thought the passage I quoted was definitive, but if you need more in order to be convinced, here's the next paragraph:
The striga fell back as if hit by a mallet but kept her feet, extended her talons, bared her fangs. Her hair stood on end and fluttered as if she were walking against a fierce wind. With difficulty, one rasping step at a time, she slowly advanced. But she did advance.
Geralt grew uneasy. He did not expect such a simple Sign to paralyze the striga entirely but neither did he expect the beast to overcome it so easily. He could not hold the Sign for long, it was too exhausting, and the striga had no more than ten steps to go. He lowered the Sign suddenly, and sprung aside. The striga, taken by surprise, flew forward, lost her balance, fell, slid along the floor and tumbled down the stairs into the crypt's entrance, yawning in the floor.
-- from the short story "The Witcher," from the story collection
The Last Wish, by Andrzej Sapkowski (as translated by Danusia Stok)
It's Aard. Not Aard mixed with Igni or alternating with Igni or anything to do with Igni. It's just Aard.
The people who made the opening movie followed the short story extremely closely. If you have the book in front of you while you watch the movie, you can see that almost every detail is exact. It's a masterful job of capturing the story, in addition to being a damned good movie ... and a wow of an opening for the first game from an unknown developer.
I was glad to read the story that first time, because it explained a part of the movie that I hadn't quite understood. There's a part of the movie where Geralt gets a nasty look on his face, and I didn't quite understand what was supposed to be happening there. But it's true to the story, just as the rest of the movie is. Here's what's happening:
Geralt was close again, the blade shimmering in his hand. His eyes lit up with an ominous glow, a hoarse roar tore through his clenched teeth. The striga backed away, pushed by the power of concentrated hatred, anger and violence which emanated from the attacking man and struck her in waves, penetrating her mind and body. Terrified and pained by feelings unknown to her, she let out a thin, shaking squeak, turned on the spot and ran off in a desperate crazy escape down the dark tangle of the palace's corridors.
Geralt stood quivering in the middle of the hall. Alone. It had taken a long time, he thought, before this dance on the edge of an abyss, this mad, macabre ballet of a fight, had achieved the desired effect, allowed him to psychically become one with his opponent, to reach the underlayers of concentrated will which permeated the striga. The evil, twisted will from which the striga was born. The witcher shivered at the memory of taking on that evil to redirect it, as if in a mirror, against the monster. Never before had he come across such a concentration of hatred and murderous frenzy, not even from basilisks, who enjoyed a ferocious reputation for it.
-- from the short story "The Witcher," from the story collection
The Last Wish, by Andrzej Sapkowski (as translated by Danusia Stok)
slimgrin said:
Does anybody confirm this?
Yep. Here are the lines from the story for that part:
He had only just pulled the cover closed when he heard the striga's roar again. He lay on his back next to Adda's mummified corpse and traced the Sign of Yrden on the inside of the slab. He laid his sword on his chest, stood a tiny hourglass filled with phosphorescent sand next to it and crossed his arms. He no longer heard the striga's screams as she searched the palace. He had gradually stopped hearing anything as the true-love and celandine began to work.
-- from the short story "The Witcher," from the story collection
The Last Wish, by Andrzej Sapkowski (as translated by Danusia Stok)
In the story, Yrden sounds more like a locking spell than like the trap spell we know from the game, but as RoyalistGirl says, the developers had to adjust the story's spells a bit in order to make them fit a game.
