With the release of Netflix's The Witcher series slowly but surely approaching, leaked footage of what is purportedly actors wearing Nilfgaardian armor has appeared on the Redanian Intelligence YouTube channel. The video doesn't reveal anything about the story or surprise cameo appearances—it's mainly just actors goofing around off-camera—but the armor is really something to see.
Comments on YouTube and Resetera are not entirely positive about the armor's appearance. One described it as "homemade hockey gear," while another likened it to "generic Mordor," and a third said the actors wearing it look like "Power Ranger mooks." One particularly silver-tongued observer described the soldiers as looking like "ballsacks with swords," which, okay, yeah, that's fair.
But cooler heads pointed out that what you see in these clips is almost certainly not what you'll see on film: Between post-production effects and the inherent changes wrought by the camera, what you see in the Netflix series probably isn't going to look quite like this.
Even so, the armor is interesting to see because it's so completely different from Nilfgaardian armor in The Witcher games, particularly The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, in which the powerful Empire of Nilfgaard invades the Northern Kingdoms. The color is correct—Nilfgaardians are colloquially known as the Black Ones—and the insignia fits, but otherwise it's not even remotely similar.
It's possible that this armor is being worn by some faction of the Nilfgaardian military that we haven't run into yet, or that the weird design is intended to facilitate some weird, post-production CGI effect, although I don't think that seems very likely. Whatever it turns out to be (and yes, it's also possible that they'll just look cheap and terrible), I imagine that we'll get a proper look at them fairly soon: The Witcher on Netflix is expected to debut late this year, and there will surely be no small amount of pre-release hype leading into it.
