The Lasting Legacy of The Witcher 3

It being the Witcher, it is not straight forward to parse exactly what the right choice is in any given situation. There is no Manchiean concept of right or wrong, no simple black or white; rather throughout it is many shades of grey. The game makes it easy enough to make the wrong one with the right intent and players will end up with outcomes they will not enjoy, and may weigh on the conscience. To this day I see plenty of reddit posts saying ‘why have I got the bad ending, I did everything I thought was for the best’. Art here reflecting life.

An early quest you find in Velen is the Bloody Baron, one of the best in the game It is a dark tale with elements of alcoholism and domestic abuse, that leads you to children-eating witches in a swamp and no matter what you do you cannot save everyone the way you would want to. Like Geralt in Sapkowski’s ‘The Last Wish’ you are forced to choose between two evils, and both outcomes will weigh heavily on you.

In another questline, after spending a delightful evening being wined and dined (amongst other things) by a beautiful sorceress you awake to find her gone. Chasing after her knowing the disaster that will unfold if you allow her to follow the course of action she is on, you think you have picked the right dialogue options to save her and prevent it and instead find yourself in a fight to the death with her, the last thing you want. The game forces you to make these tough decisions with outcomes opague and uncertain, some of which affect entire nations and peoples, and some you will not see the consequences of until much later. It is a refreshing and challenging gaming experience.

That constant walking between devil and deep blue sea is one of the reasons this game is so compelling to play, and a huge reason for its enduring appeal. With its complex storytelling, rich world-building and repeatedly forcing you to confront your own morality in an incredibly nuanced way, it creates an emotional bond with the characters and a deeply personal investment in the narrative. Your decisions matter to you, not because it means you win or lose the game or get a great sword or a fancy set of armour, but because you care. I saw an debate arguing the game was not a RPG: the first reply was, ‘of course it is, you are role-playing Geralt’, and you really do become the character. Few other games feel as immersive.

It is important to note that CDPR’s games are not adaptions of Sapkowski’s novels, canonically they are set after the end of the books, but they take inspiration from and capture the spirit of those stories brilliantly (and do a better job of bringing the Witcher world to a new medium than the television series has done working directly from the source material). Like an inverse Game Of Thrones, CD Projekt Red have gone beyond the books and still managed to deliver a narrative as poignant and memorable as the novels.

A Tale of Two Love Stories

You only have to look at the other debate that rages on among fans of the game: are you team Yen or team Triss? You can romance either, neither or try both and each has a different outcome. If you were like me and played the game knowing nothing of the lore having neither read the books before or the previous games then your choices are instinctual and come with none of the baggage from the characters’ weighty backstories.

Both options are sorceresses (Geralt seems to like women that can cast spells on him); Triss is a coquettish red-headed delight, Yennefer a stern raven-haired beauty. You first briefly meet Yennefer early in the prologue, where she tasks with finding Ciri. Triss you catch up with after you leave Velen and enter the wonderfully realised city of Novigrad. The timing of your reunion could be better: the local religion has declared all mages traitors and a pogrom is underway against them. Triss is selflessly leading the underground railway spiriting the hunted magic users out of the city and you end up aiding her. Game Triss is selfless, brave, fierce and fun: you spend a magical evening with her at a moonlit party, and later she is willing and strong enough to undergo torture at the hands of the Witchfinders as part of a ruse to get information that aids Geralt’s quest to find Ciri. Her revenge on them is memorable. By the end you are more than happy to tell her you love her. But the nature of the game means that might be premature.

Because then in Skellige you spend time with Yennefer. She is a very different character to Triss; aloof, sarcastic, dismissive even a little mean to Geralt. With her you investigate local berserkers who transform into bears and murder a lot of people, culminating eventually with the two of you sat on a wrecked boat on top of a mountain. After defeating an ifrit which releases you both from the geas that binds your fates together (the mission is called ‘The Last Wish’ after Sapkowski’s book of the same name where that happens) she asks you if you still love her now the spell is lifted. She has a look on her face, a mixture of fear and sadness, afraid of what Geralt’s answer will be, that makes your heart just melt.

The answer is of course you do, unless you told Triss that you loved her, in case it should be you do not, even if you really want to, and there are no immediate consequences for doing so (emphasis on immediate). But the choice is yours, one that stays with you and you have to live with the consequences of it.

“We must find Ciri, and then defeat the Hunt...but...I doubt the world will end if we sit here a while. Ahh...my, it's lovely”

Winds Howling….

One thing a lot of open-world games have in common is the sheer jaw-dropping beauty of them. Witcher 3 is no exception, despite being a ten year old game it sets a high bar that few others come close to let alone surpass. Each region you visit has a unique rhythmn and tone: you start in White Orchard and Velen, recently war-ravaged with frequent charnel battlefields choked with bodies of the dead and broken engines of war. Storms roll in with driving rain and mists that shroud its low-lying marshlands and rolling hills, followed by immense, ocher-tinged sunsets. But throughout there is a melancholic, eerie beauty there.

At one end of the Velen map is Novigrad. This is one of the best cities I have explored in a game, at least as good as any of the famously detailed cities in the Assassin’s Creed series. It is a brilliantly realised, vibrant medieval city full of teaming bustle throughout its labyrinthine streets that has you dodging street traders during the day and drunks at night. Your time spent there exploring its dark underbelly is memorable.

Then there is the quiet majesty of the mountainous islands of Skellige, reminiscent of the west coast of Scotland or the fjords of Norway, with a fierce people to match. You also visit Geralt’s home; the semi-ruined castle of Kaer Morhen, set amongst a gorgeous alpine vista. Then finally you visit the warm, shimmering blues and greens of the hills and vineyards of Toussaint which bear a striking resemblence to Southern European regions like Tuscany, Piedmont or the Langudoc.

And each is accompanied by unique theme music; atmospheric, ambient orchestral pieces that ebb and flow as you move through these exquisite landscapes eyes wide with wonder, creating a mood few games attempt and fewer still achieve. Suddenly the pitch will shift, the intensity grows: a monster approaches and you are snatched from your reverie and into white-hot combat, only for it to fade again as the your opponent bleeds out their last. It is incredibly rich world-building, so immersive you can just fire up the game and simply enjoy being in it all.

No discussion of The Witcher’s music could be complete without talking about one of the most profound and moving moments I have experienced in any game. Geralt, newly arrived in Novigrad looking for Dandelion and Ciri, visits The Kingfisher Inn and someone takes to the stage as Geralt takes his seat. She sits, tunes her lute and after a couple of experimental plucks plays some haunting chords before starting to sing. The inn instantly quiets, its patrons turning to watch, lovers turn to hold each other close, while those alone brush away tears. The song is called ‘The Wolven Storm’ but is commonly simply called Priscilla’s song, after the character that sings it.

“You flee my dream come the morning
Your scent – berries tart, lilac sweet
To dream of raven locks entwisted, stormy
Of violet eyes, glistening as you weep”

The first comment below is: ‘real men didn’t skip this’ which somehow just sums it up. It is a moment of simple, exquisite poignance that might lurch into corny were it not so deftly executed, instead carrying an emotional weight that lingers long after you power the console down. The song is about Geralt’s complicated love affair with Yennefer (she of violet eyes and lilac and gooseberries perfume), and a persuasive reason to get yourself on team Yen after such a stirring moment.

If you go down to the woods today...

You are in for a big surprise. Beware when its starts to get darker, the wind starts howling and a pack of wolves appears, because you are about to have a close encounter with arguably the Witcher’s most iconic monster, the Leshy or Leshen. It is a haunting, vaguely humanoid creature with a stag’s skull and antlers, a tall, stick thin body with branches for limbs. A woodland spirit and the protector of the forests in combat the Leshy can walk behind a tree and reappear from behind another one to attack from a whole new angle. But he is just one of well over a hundred monsters in the game, from wraiths to wyverns.

And they litter the landscape; go swimming in a lake and you run the risk of attack from drowners, the insectoid endragas lurk in the woods just off the paths, sailing in Skellige carries the inherent risk of attack from sirens, cross a charnel battlefield full of the bodies of the slain and chances are you disturb the ghouls feeding on them. One of the most normal, a pack of wolves, is also one of the most annoying and challenging, surrounding you and darting in for numerous fast attacks. Others, like the fiends and chorts, are simply terrifying in their visage, or just foul like the waterhags and the triffid-like archespores.

All are brilliantly designed and provide a huge variety of combatants that require constant adaption and for you to lean heavily into the use of your signs to counter their strengths, as well as the oils you can apply to your swords and the varied potions you can consume to boost certain abilities. It creates a rich tapestry of constant intrigue few games come close to. You can of course just spur Roach to gallop past, not without its own risks, but at the end of the day you are a Witcher, and fighting monsters is what you do.  

We have to talk about Roach….

The game is not without flaws. There is a persistent criticism of the combat system from certain quarters, notably adherents of the Dark Souls-type games (commonly called ‘Soulslike’). Personally I enjoyed its fluidity and the unique incorporation of a series of Witcher signs, minor magic Geralt is able to conjur that can slow enemies down, shoot fireballs at them or raise a protective barrier around him (something that I totally abused fighting higher level enemies). Your combat style is further tweaked by the swords and armour sets with accompanying buffs you get throughout the game, as well as new systems later introduced in the DLCs. But for purists it lacks weight and nuance.

One flaw every player can agree on is how bad your transport is in the game. Roach, your faithful horse, is comprehensively broken and is the launcher of a thousand memes. Many of those will have her spawning on top of a house when summoned, but more so she has a tendency to veer violently off-course, stop suddenly and just be generally incompetent and unpredictable. It is a measure of how good the rest of the game is that you forgive it for just how poor this mechanic is. An alternative many resort to downing the werewolf decoction, a potion that allows you to run as fast as your her.

Then there is the balancing. You could theoretically just blast through the main questline from beginning to end, However this is an open-world game and a big one at that: every village has notice boards with monsters for you to hunt, each map is littered is with questions marks or points of interest. These side-quests are numerous and investigating them all is a challenge and time consuming. Ostensibly you are in a mad rush to save Ciri but for the curious and thorough there is always time for exploration. At the start of the game these can easily lead to a sticky end for Geralt, with you under-leveled and the monster over-powered; others trigger a series of events that might lead to a special sword, a unique set or armour, or just a frying pan (there is a special place in hell for whoever designed the Skellige map).

But do these religiously and soon the opposite becomes true and when you do finally return to the main quests after exploring every inch of the maps Geralt is a over-powered wrecking machine. To compensate the game does offer a power-scaling mechanic that brings opponents to your level but it doesn’t fully address it, and a frequent complaint is that the big boss battles and especially the final encounter with the leader of the Wild Hunt are too easy and underwhelming. But the journey is what counts, and this disparity is more than addressed if you play the DLCs.

Enter The Toad Prince…

As yes the DLCs. I can think of no other game where the DLCs have added so much to the legend of the base game. The first, Hearts of Stone, is by turns sad, hilarious, haunting and utterly terrifying. The story at its stone heart is a tragedy worthy of Shakespeare, with an antagonist that makes you feel the need to go and burn some sage to cleanse yourself after encountering. The character you are helping, Olgierd von Everec (who looks suspiciously like David Beckham) is someone who has done things so morally repugnant that when the decision comes whether he lives or dies the obvious one is to damn him, but somewhere along the line the game contrives to make you care about him.

And if you were disappointed about the paucity of the final boss fight in the main game then Hearts of Stone will quickly change that. First off is the Toad Prince hiding in the sewers of Oxenfurt, clearly a long lost relation of Oggdo Bogdo in the Star Wars: Fallen Order game, with a fight almost as infamous. It keeps up the pace with combat against the Ofieri mage immediately afterwards, then a relentless duel with Olgierd that felt like it lasted forever and left me burning through every health boost I had and the need to put a packet of frozen peas on my aching hand. Then there is the faceless Caretaker and his demonic spade, before finally Iris’ Greatest Fear, seven shade versions of Olgierd that if you are skillful you take down one by one but if you are not, like me, come at you all at once.

Away from its titanic boss-fights there is a brilliant heist and a memorable evening spent at a wedding where Geralt is possessed by the spirit of Olgierd’s dead brother, wanting one last night on earth to party. And he certainly manages to do that, with dancing, drinking, pig-herding and his unceasing attempts to seduce Geralt’s current love-interest Shani, another romance option in the game and one that captures more than a few hearts from Yennefer. At least here you do not have to worry about that capricious sorceress’ vengeance. It is all brilliantly executed and at once whimsical, hilarious and tragic.

Hearts of Stone encapsulates everything that is great about Witcher 3, offering one of the most intense and compelling gaming experiences through its razor-sharp narrative, fascinating characters and those difficult choices that drag the player into the heart of the action and make them vector for the outcome. Do you let Iris keep the rose and stay within her painted world, or take it and lead her into nothingness? Do you abandon Olgierd to his fate or fight for his salvation? All the while you wonder at the genuinely creepy Gaunter O’Dimm’s true nature. It is a gaming experience that cuts close to the bone; so much so when I came to it on my second NG+ playthrough I left it before finishing, unwilling to live through its bittersweet trauma again.

Lips that touch wine shall never touch mine…

With every successful game there is a clamour for a good DLC, and CD Projekt Red would be forgiven if they had finished with Hearts of Stone, but they didn’t and it is credit to them they followed it with something even more expansive. Late in the game you will see a new point of interest appear in a village outside of Oxenfurt. Go there and you find a pair of quaintly-accented armoured knights who want to take Geralt somewhere away from all of this. Hearts of Stone opens up the Velen map a little, giving you an extra area to explore north-east of Novigrad. Blood and Wine trumps it by giving you an entirely new country to investigate: the stunning environs of Toussaint, one of the most beautiful locations in a game already full of them. It’s a landscape reminiscent of somewhere in Southern Europe, full of vineyards and Disney-princess architecture set against a backdrop of soaring, snow-capped mountains.

But you are not here to enjoy the views because beneath its picture-postcard scenery lies a darkness: unleashed vampires and a lot of them. The storyline may lack the sheer gravitas of Hearts of Stone but it more than makes up for it with its sheer scope. For me it always felt like a unofficial Witcher 4, with an entirely new map, a fantastic new city in Beauclair, fresh monsters, a new and inventive skill tree and a final, soulslike boss fight that makes Eredin at the end of the main game feel like playfighting a puppy.

It also came with a new song, one so good the Danish National Symphony Orchestra recently performed it (above). Listen to the words to hear how encountering a Witcher is from the monsters’ point of view.

Those vampires have been unleashed by Syanna, exiled sister of Anna Henrietta, ruler of Toussaint. They are led by Detlaff, a higher vampire and Syanna’s lover, manipulated by her to be her dark angel of vengeance. Anna, ignorant of her sister’s plotting and anxious to help her, has hidden her in an magical world of illusion, the Land of a Thousand Fables. Of course Geralt has to go in to find her, resulting in a truly bonkers adventure fighting the likes of the Big Bad Wolf and the Wicked Witch of the West in a land of fairy tales.

Here again choices feature heavily for the player; choose right and Toussaint gets its happily-ever-after, the sisters reunited and the vampires banished, choose wrong and one or both of the sisters die and Geralt can find himself in prison, only rescued by his friend Dandelion. But whatever else happens here in Toussaint, memorably and perfectly, we see the end of Geralt’s journey, but not in the way you might imagine.

Unlike the books there is no ambiguity to his fate and no angry crowd with pitchforks; here he can finally rest from the path at Corvo Bianco, the winery gifted to him by Anna Henrietta (which for me was the purest heaven). Under a tree overlooking your vineyards you can finally pull up a chaise-longue and get a well earned rest and, depending on the choices you made in the rest of the game, you are joined by a special someone to enjoy that view with. It is a poignant and fitting end.

They say a Witcher never dies in his bed, but Geralt will test that old saying. It feels right to leave him there, at the end of his long journey. We know now he is not the protagonist in the Witcher 4, the steel and silver swords will be taken up by his daughter Ciri, although it is hard to imagine he won’t put in an appearance at some point. And there is always the possibility of prequels and pre-prequels at some point, such is the love players have for the character.

And it is a deep affection. He is the emotional heart of the game, and his relationship with Ciri sits at its core. There is a moment at the mid-point of the main questline when you finally find her but believe her to be dead. You can feel his heart breaking through the screen, as he picks up and cradles your limp body, because your heart is breaking too. Then suddenly she stirs and her arms reach around him and your elation and relief is as powerful as his would be. No games I have played before or since have ever pulled a moment as moving and profound as that. It speaks of the intense connection you develop with the character you are playing, and through him a strong bond with his friends, lovers and family.

Perhaps the video from CD Projekt Red below best sums the relationship between game and players up, released in 2017 ten years after the release of the first game. For those that have played the game it is an absolute joy.

And there we have it. I feel like I have written far too much but somehow haven’t written enough. I haven’t even mentioned Vesemir, mentor and father-figure to Geralt and the battle of Kear Morhen; or the time you, Eskel and Lambert get drunk and put on Yennefer’s clothes, or the Skellige flame-haired maiden Cerys and the baby in the oven, or the tragedy of Skjall and the werewolf Morkvag, or the grind for Grandmaster Witcher armour, or the sword Aerondight given you by the Lady in the Lake, but surely it is enough for now? I think I have covered everything of real importance….

How abut a game of Gwent?

A mini-game as part of an open-world is practically default these days. I remember playing poker in the original Red Dead Redemption for hours. In fact I played that more than I did the rest of the game. Horizon: Forbidden West has one called Machine Strike I which admittedly did not not give much of a go. Apparently AC Valhalla has a dice game called Orlog which, despite sinking many hours of gameplay into I was unaware of until now. GTA V has a very-well rounded game of golf if that is your bag.

Witcher 3 has Gwent. Gwent is two-player card game which has developed a cult-like following to the point it is now a stand-alone game with professional tournaments. In my first play-through I completely ignored it after you are introduced to it early on in an Inn in White Orchard. But that was a mistake; while not essential to completing the game, it is to some side-quests, notably a tournament at the Passiflora. If you are a completionist collecting every card gives you a trophy, and that is impossible without playing it regularly and challenging a lot of the NPCs to a game and winning their cards from them.

On my second playthrough I gave it a proper go, and was amazed to find out just how good it is. It is boils down to fighting a battle with your cards between various factions: Northern realms, Nilfgaard Empire, Monsters, Scoia’teal and Skellige each with different strengths and weaknesses, and associated stratagems. It is complex, nuanced and very addictive, with the additional bonus of getting to beat a particularly obnoxious elf in the tournament.

Which inevitably leads us to memes. Almost as amusing to the game’s online communities as the shortcomings of Roach is Geralt’s fondness for a game of Gwent dispite the ongoing urgency of finding Ciri. No matter you are doing or where you are going, there is always time for a game of Gwent.

I am going to have to download it again, aren’t I?

Written by A James Cole

My thanks to the online Witcher communities on Reddit for inspiration and numerous screenshots. Credit to u/suuubdude for the white frost below, u/dizzy_corner5356 for Geralt v Griffon and u/immafuckboi for Triss and Geralt