The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

• 1. Introduction

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  When The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt launched in 2015, Poland's prime minister, Ewa Kopacz, and its president, Bronisław Komorowski, visited the studio behind it. That studio was CD Projekt Red, and the game was an open-world action role-playing adventure built on the Witcher novels of Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski. Its hero, Geralt of Rivia, is a monster slayer for hire. This time the job is personal. His adopted daughter Ciri is on the run from a band of spectral warriors called the Wild Hunt, and Geralt searches a war-torn fantasy world to find her. Along the way, the player decides how conversations unfold, and those decisions reshape the lives of the people Geralt meets. How does a witcher fight, and what is the world he crosses? What went on inside a studio that spent years building it? And why did critics and players treat a game with known technical flaws as one of the greatest ever made?

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• 2. The Witcher's Toolkit

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  Geralt carries two swords, one of steel and one of silver, and the choice between them matters in every fight. Steel is meant for human opponents, while silver works better against creatures and monsters. Light attacks are fast but weak, and heavy attacks are slow but strong. Players can block and counter, but the blades have limited endurance and need regular repair. Bombs and a crossbow complete his arsenal. For the first time in the series, Geralt can also jump, climb and swim.

  Five magical signs named Aard, Axii, Igni, Yrden and Quen give him options beyond steel. Aard unleashes a telekinetic blast. Axii confuses enemies, and Igni burns them. Yrden slows them down, while Quen wraps the player in a temporary protective shield. Signs drain stamina, so they cannot be used endlessly. Mutagens boost his magic power, and meditation, food and potions restore his health. At certain moments, players also take control of Ciri, who can teleport short distances.

  A werewolf grows powerful on the night of a full moon, which shows how the day-night cycle changes the monsters Geralt meets. Players can study the in-game bestiary to prepare for each foe, then loot the corpse afterward. Geralt's witcher sense highlights objects of interest, from collectable items to clues. Loot can be sold to vendors or turned into potions and bombs, and blacksmiths and armorers craft new weapons and armour from gathered materials. Prices and crafting costs rise and fall with each region's local economy. Completing quests earns experience points, and each new level grants ability points to spend on four skill trees: combat, signs, alchemy and general.

  The game's dialogue tree lets players choose how Geralt answers every non-player character. Those decisions change the state of the world and lead to 36 possible endings that affect the lives of in-game characters. Certain quests can even open a romance with some of the female characters. Books scattered through the world add background on its history and creatures.

  A town's noticeboard is where most side quests begin. Witcher Contracts are elaborate monster hunts, while Treasure Hunt quests pay out top-tier weapons or armour. The open world is divided into several regions, which Geralt crosses on foot or by boat. His horse Roach can be summoned at will, and Geralt can fight from the saddle. A nearby enemy may frighten the horse and unseat him. Places of Power reward extra ability points, and diversions include horse racing, boxing and card playing. One of those pastimes, the card game, later grew into a standalone release called Gwent: The Witcher Card Game.

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• 3. A Continent At War

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  The Continent, the setting for the series, is rooted in Slavic folklore and surrounded by parallel dimensions and extra-dimensional worlds. Humans, elves, dwarves and monsters live side by side. In the northern realms, however, non-humans are often persecuted for being different.

  Emperor Emhyr var Emreis of Nilfgaard, voiced by Charles Dance, has invaded the Northern Kingdoms, and Redania under King Radovid V stands in the way. The war touches every place Geralt visits. Novigrad is a free city, and Oxenfurt belongs to Redania. Velen is a no man's land, and Vizima is the former capital of the recently conquered Temeria. The Skellige islands are home to several clans who resemble Norse-Gaels. Kaer Morhen is the stronghold of the witchers.

  Geralt, voiced by Doug Cockle, has been trained since childhood in combat, tracking, alchemy and magic. Mutagens have made him stronger, faster and resistant to toxins. His circle includes the sorceress Yennefer of Vengerberg, played by Denise Gough, who is his lover. Triss Merigold, voiced by Jaimi Barbakoff, is a former love interest. The bard Dandelion is voiced by John Schwab, and the dwarf warrior Zoltan Chivay by Alexander Morton. William Roberts voices Vesemir, the witcher who mentored Geralt.

  Ciri, voiced by Jo Wyatt, is the adopted daughter of Geralt and Yennefer. She is a Source, a person born with innate and potentially vast magical ability. After the apparent death of her parents, she trained as a witcher while Yennefer taught her magic. Years before the story begins, she vanished to escape the Wild Hunt. That group of spectral warriors is led by its king, the elf Eredin, who is voiced by Steven Hartley and comes from a parallel dimension. Why he wants her so badly is the first secret the search uncovers.

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• 4. The Search For Ciri

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  At the town of White Orchard, Geralt and Vesemir arrive hoping to find Yennefer, his long-lost lover. Geralt slays a griffin that has been terrorizing the area, and Yennefer then approaches him. She takes him to Emperor Emhyr, who orders him to join the Nilfgaardian search for Ciri. Ciri is the last heir to an ancient elven bloodline that lets her manipulate space-time, and that gift is why the Wild Hunt pursues her. Geralt learns that she was seen in three places: Velen, Novigrad and the Skellige Isles.

  In Velen, a war-ravaged province, Geralt learns that Ciri fought witches before finding refuge with a warlord known as the Bloody Baron. The sorceress Keira Metz, who is in hiding after the events of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, tells him the witches are the Crones. They are three malicious sisters who watch over Velen. She also mentions that Ciri travels with a mysterious elf. The baron agrees to talk if Geralt finds his missing family, and then reveals that he sent Ciri to Novigrad.

  In Novigrad, Geralt meets old acquaintances again, including his former lover Triss. He learns that Ciri sought out his friend Dandelion while trying to cure a curse, and that the two crossed Novigrad's crime bosses. Geralt and his friends rescue Dandelion, who explains that Ciri teleported away to escape her pursuers.

  In Skellige, Yennefer's investigation shows that Ciri first came to the isles with her companion but was separated from him when the Wild Hunt attacked. The trail then leads to the village of Lofoten, where the pair reunited before the Hunt struck again and forced them onto a boat. When that boat came back to shore, its only occupant was Uma, a deformed creature Geralt had seen with the Bloody Baron. Geralt deduces that Uma is the curse victim Ciri meant to save and takes him to Kaer Morhen. With Yennefer and the other witchers, he breaks the curse and restores Uma's true self, the elf Avallac'h. Avallac'h explains that he put Ciri into an enchanted sleep on a magical island to keep her safe from the Hunt.

  Geralt travels to the island and reunites with Ciri. She tells him that Eredin wants her powers to save his homeworld from the White Frost, a magical force that moves between worlds and turns them into frozen wastelands. Back at Kaer Morhen, the Hunt closes in and outmatches the defenders. Vesemir is killed, and Ciri unleashes her uncontrolled power, forcing the Hunt to retreat.

  Geralt and Ciri then take the fight to the Hunt. At a Witches' Sabbath hosted by the Crones, they ambush and kill Imlerith, the killer of Vesemir. Two Crones also die, but the third escapes. Triss and Yennefer reform the Lodge of Sorceresses to help, and Avallac'h sets a trap by luring the Hunt to Skellige. In the battle that follows, Geralt personally faces and slays Eredin. Before dying, Eredin claims that Avallac'h plans to use Ciri's power for his own ends.

  With the Hunt defeated, the White Frost suddenly begins creeping across the Continent. Geralt and Yennefer chase Avallac'h and find Ciri alive and well. She reveals that Avallac'h only ever meant to fight the White Frost. Ciri confronts it and destroys it, though whether she survives depends on the player's choices throughout the game. Three endings are possible. If she lives and Geralt once took her to meet Emhyr, she becomes empress of Nilfgaard. If she lives but never met Emhyr, or Nilfgaard lost the war, Geralt helps her fake her death and she becomes a witcher. If she dies, Geralt hunts down the last Crone and quietly mourns her.

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• 5. Building The World

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  Production was supposed to start in 2008, but CD Projekt Red was absorbed in Rise of the White Wolf, and the work slipped to 2011. The team then spent three and a half years on the game with a self-funded budget of US$81 million. The project began with 150 employees and grew to over 250 in-house staff. Worldwide, 1,500 people took part in the production. The game follows Sapkowski's novels but is not an official continuation of them, and his own role was limited to creating the in-game map.

  The game was localised in 15 languages and used a total of 500 voice actors. Developers scripted it in Polish and English at the same time to ease the later work of localisation. According to Side, the company that handled voice casting and recording, the script ran to 450,000 words and 950 speaking roles. Recording sessions stretched from late 2012 to early 2015.

  The studio also chose to ship without digital rights management, known as DRM. Its attempt to control piracy on The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings had failed, and that game's DRM had also made it run slowly.

  The game runs on REDengine 3, the studio's own engine, designed for nonlinear role-playing games set in open worlds. The first complete play-through gave the developers an unwelcome surprise, because the open world felt empty despite all the quests built into it. Their answer was to add points of interest. By December, the game carried 5,000 bugs, which together with a planned February 2015 launch forced a postponement.

  Several design choices shaped how the game feels. A grid-based interface made menus more intuitive. The camera pulls back to long shots when Geralt fights several enemies and moves in close for more personal confrontations. Combat uses more animations than The Witcher 2, each lasting under a second so that attacks follow one another quickly. Game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz and senior game designer Damien Monnier cited Dark Souls and Demon's Souls as influences on combat. Level designer Miles Tost and senior environment artist Jonas Mattsson pointed to The Legend of Zelda series and Red Dead Redemption. The developers also credited the Gothic series. CD Projekt had localized and published Gothic in Poland in 2002 and Gothic II in 2003, and Gothic 3 followed in 2006. All three were popular there, so they were a success for the company as a regional publisher.

  Months before release, the economy, crafting and inventory systems were incomplete and seemed unlikely to meet the deadline. Senior gameplay designer Matthew Steinke drew up a system context diagram and wrote a formula to set prices from rates of damage, defence or healing. He tested it with polynomial least squares, and it removed bugs from the system and cut loading times.

  The writers aimed for wit, metaphor and implied meaning, and they gave each character a distinct personality to avoid the usual fetch-quest feel. Early on, dialogue for each side quest was capped at 15 lines, and writers had to justify the quality and necessity of their dialogue to earn an extension. Player options were written as morally ambiguous, mirroring real life and Sapkowski's original series. Alcoholism, abuse and sexuality appear as ordinary parts of the medieval world for the sake of authenticity. Areas of the open world drew on Poland, Amsterdam and Scandinavia, and objects were modelled by hand.

  Some storylines never made it in. Yennefer imprisoning Geralt on an island and Geralt's covert recruitment into the Wild Hunt were cut to keep the game smaller and avoid splitting it into two parts. Gwent also had rivals before it won its place. Other minigame proposals included a drinking game, knife throwing and ice skating.

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• 6. Music And Battle Sounds

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  For the sounds of battle, the team recorded a re-enactment of the Battle of Grunwald. The session captured marching, blacksmithing and the firing of arrows. Knights' voices were recorded for later post-processing, and the speakers wore helmets to get an authentic sound.

  Marcin Przybyłowicz served as music director and composer. Additional music came from Percival, a Polish folk band that plays reconstructions of medieval instruments. The group performs its own compositions as well as old Slavic melodies, which made it a good fit for what Przybyłowicz had in mind. Working with the band was a challenge for him. He had expected an academic approach, only to learn that most members were not formally trained and that much of the music was improvised.

  Robert Jaworski, a multi-instrumentalist from the folk band Żywiołak, recorded lute, Renaissance fiddle, bowed gusle and hurdy-gurdy parts. The orchestral score was performed by the Brandenburg State Orchestra in Frankfurt an der Oder, under conductor Bernd Ruf. Best Score/Soundtrack later appeared among the categories listed for the game at The Game Awards 2015.

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• 7. Launch And Afterlife

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  CD Projekt Red announced the game in 2013, with a planned release the following year on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. The date moved first from the third quarter of 2014 to February 2015. After missing the 24th of February, the studio confirmed in April that the game had been released to manufacturing. The worldwide launch came on the 19th of May 2015. Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment and Bandai Namco Entertainment handled physical distribution, in North America and Western Europe and in Australia and New Zealand respectively. A Collector's Edition added an artbook, a statue of Geralt fighting a griffin and a Witcher medallion.

  Marcin Iwiński, co-founder of CD Projekt Red, named three pillars of marketing: game quality, a "gamer-centric value proposition", and communication with fans. For the second pillar, the game was pitched as "Skyrim in a Game of Thrones sauce". For the third, the studio explained in detail why the finished game looked worse than earlier promotional footage, which Iwiński thought worked well. The logo was redesigned to hide that this was a sequel. To newcomers the number three looked like a claw mark or a mask, while fans would recognise it as the mark of the Wild Hunt.

  The developer studied Witcher forums and sites such as Reddit to guess what players wanted from downloadable content. It announced 16 free DLC packs before release, including cosmetic and gameplay extras and the New Game Plus mode. Two paid expansions followed. Hearts of Stone arrived on the 13th of October 2015 and sends Geralt after a mysterious entity called the Man of Glass and an immortal man named Olgierd von Everec. Blood and Wine came out on the 31st of May 2016. It takes Geralt to Toussaint, a Nilfgaardian duchy untouched by war, to track a beast terrorizing the region, and it won Best RPG at The Game Awards 2016. A Game of the Year edition with the base game, both expansions and all DLC was released on the 30th of August 2016. A third expansion, Songs of the Past, is due in 2027 from CD Projekt Red and Fool's Theory.

  The Nintendo Switch version was announced at E3 2019, built with Saber Interactive, and released on the 15th of October 2019. It has slight graphical downgrades to suit the weaker hardware but is otherwise identical to other versions.

  The PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S release came on the 14th of December 2022 as a free "Next-Gen" update for existing owners, and it could also be bought separately. Players praised its higher resolution textures and ray-tracing. In 2021, Kotaku reported that the update might include fan-made mod content. The creator of a texture mod, "HalkHogan", said the developer was in talks about the "The Witcher 3 HD Reworked Project". CD Projekt Red confirmed that it had spoken with mod creators. That raised the question of why a company that earned $300 million in 2020 sought community help.

  The update was first scheduled for the second half of 2021 and then pushed to the second quarter of 2022. Saber Interactive originally handled the work. On the 13th of April 2022, CD Projekt Red announced that its in-house team would take over and that the date would slip again. Retail copies reached shelves on the 26th of January 2023. The update added new outfits, a quest inspired by the Netflix series, and all previously released DLC. It shipped on schedule but drew criticism for performance issues and bugs. Later that day, the studio said it was investigating and preparing fixes.

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• 8. Acclaim And Sales

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  Metacritic summarised reviews of the PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S versions as "universal acclaim", and the Switch version as "generally favorable reviews". GameSpot and Eurogamer gave the game their highest rating. Critics agreed it was ambitious and grand in scale, but they found it held back by technical difficulties and a lack of innovation.

  Kimberly Wallace of Game Informer called the world "immersive" and admired its attention to detail. Tom Senior of GamesRadar described the variety of the open world as an "exciting realization of the Ronin fantasy". Vince Ingenito of IGN and Shaun Prescott of PC Gamer were impressed by the scenery and the day-night cycle. Jonathon Leack of Game Revolution thought much of the activity in each region was filler that stretched out the length.

  Senior called the side quests "a compilation of dark fantasy short stories" that overshadowed the main quest. Ingenito found too much padding and too many dull quests in the main story. Kevin Van Ord of GameSpot welcomed the extra characterisation of Geralt, which gave players emotional ties to the cast. Van Ord, Wallace and Brett Phipps of VideoGamer.com praised the voice acting, and Wallace called it the series' best. Arthur Gies of Polygon criticized how sexualized some of the female characters are and noted that the main game has no people of color.

  Combat drew mixed notices. Daniel Bloodworth of GameTrailers found Geralt more agile with the new climbing and swimming. Ingenito called the fluidity a major improvement. Leack faulted an unreliable lock-on system, camera problems and overly long animations, and he called the upgrade system "unexciting". Senior thought the Gwent card game was addictive. The most frequent complaints were technical. Wallace found the load times too long. Leack noted that the final game looked worse than the 2013 demonstration. Phipps called the frame rate a persistent problem that overshadowed many of the game's achievements.

  Before release, over 1.5 million people had pre-ordered the game. In its first week in the United Kingdom it topped the software chart and earned 600% more than The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings. It became the UK's best-selling game of the year, breaking a record held by Battlefield Hardline. In Japan it opened at number one with 67,385 units in the first week. Four million units sold in the first two weeks.

  By June 2015, over 690,000 players had activated the game through GOG Galaxy. The game then sold over six million units in six weeks, and the studio made a profit of $63.3 million in the first half of 2015. By March 2016, nearly 10 million units had shipped. The December 2019 release of the first season of the Netflix series The Witcher lifted December sales by 554% over December 2018. The game reached over 28 million units by the end of 2019, and 30 million by April 2021. It passed 40 million in April 2022-50 million in May 2023 and 60 million in May 2025. By May 2026, it had sold over 65 million units.

  Awards followed the sales. It won IGN's best role-playing game at E3 in both 2013 and 2014 and was named Most Anticipated Game at the Game Awards 2014. It collected 260 game of the year awards and held the record for most awarded game of all time until The Last of Us Part II overtook it in 2021. By August 2016 the total passed 800 awards. At the 16th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards it won Game of the Year and Best Technology. In 2020, GamesRadar named it the top game of the generation, and a 2023 GQ poll of video game journalists ranked it fifth best of all time. A sequel, The Witcher IV, is now in development.

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