The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — the side quest as the main event

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt shipped on 19 May 2015 for PS4, Xbox One and PC, made by CD Projekt Red off the back of Andrzej Sapkowski’s novels and the studio’s own two earlier Witcher games, and it cast a long enough shadow that it’s easy to forget how uncertain its central premise once looked: an open-world RPG whose actual pitch was that the side quests, not the main story, would be where the game’s best writing lived. Nine years on, that premise reads less like a gamble and more like the single clearest lesson the open-world genre took from the entire decade.

Geralt is looking for his daughter, but the map doesn’t care

The main plot has Geralt of Rivia, monster hunter, searching war-torn Velen, Novigrad and the Skellige Isles for his adopted daughter Ciri, pursued by the spectral Wild Hunt, while the Empire and a fractured Northern Kingdom war around him. It’s a perfectly serviceable spine, and it is not, on its own, the reason people still talk about this game a decade later. That reason is almost always a specific side quest — most often the Bloody Baron, a multi-hour storyline about a minor warlord whose search for his missing wife and daughter unravels into a study of domestic violence, alcoholism and a genuinely difficult moral calculus about whether reuniting a broken family is actually a mercy.

What makes the Baron quest, and dozens like it, work is that CD Projekt Red wrote them with the same care as the main plot, treating them as fully weighted stories rather than padding between story beats. Each major side quest has its own three-act structure, its own reversals, and frequently its own genuinely difficult choice with consequences that ripple forward — sparing or killing a specific character in Act One can close off entire quest chains in Act Three, sometimes without any obvious warning that the earlier choice mattered at all. That’s a substantial financial bet for a studio to make on content most players will classify, going in, as optional.

The Gwent problem, in miniature

It’s worth naming one specific side-system that shows the studio’s instinct at a smaller scale: Gwent, the collectible card minigame players can pursue almost as a second game entirely, complete with its own merchant network, deck-building metagame and a devoted community that persists to this day. A plausible tavern pastime is all Gwent ever needed to be to sell copies of The Witcher 3. CD Projekt Red built it well beyond that bar anyway, eventually spinning it into its own standalone game, which says something about a studio temperamentally incapable of treating any system as merely decorative filler.

The world reacts before you notice it’s reacting

The reactivity underneath all this writing runs deeper than dialogue branches. Choices made in one region routinely surface as consequences a dozen hours and an entire landmass later — a village you helped or failed to save in Velen can determine whether a specific NPC is alive to appear in a Skellige quest chain, with no marker connecting the two events beyond the game quietly remembering what you did. That’s a genuinely expensive design commitment: writing content that might never trigger for most players, purely so the world convincingly behaves as though your actions in it had weight beyond the scene they happened in.

Novigrad’s witch-hunt subplot is a good example of how that reactivity ties into the game’s larger themes without ever becoming a lecture. Geralt, as a witcher, is himself a target of the same superstition and prejudice the game shows being turned on mages, non-humans and anyone visibly different from Novigrad’s frightened majority, and the quests around the city’s Church of the Eternal Fire let you side with, undermine or quietly ignore that persecution machine at several points without the game ever stopping to explain the parallel to you directly. It trusts a player who’s paying attention to draw the connection between Geralt’s own treatment and the treatment he’s witnessing, which is a rarer kind of restraint than most games manage when they’re building an argument about prejudice into an open world.

The honest case against it

None of that erases real structural problems. The core combat — sign magic, potions, oils and a stamina-gated sword-and-dodge loop — is functional rather than distinguished, closer to serviceable action-RPG combat than to anything as mechanically deep as the writing surrounding it, and several patches across the game’s first year were spent specifically rebalancing a system that launched noticeably undertuned on the hardest difficulties. The main story, for all its scale, also sags in its middle stretch once Velen’s most memorable content is behind you and Novigrad’s political intrigue takes over — competent, but rarely reaching the emotional specificity the Baron questline set as a bar early on.

The open world itself, while dense with hand-authored content, still leans on a scattering of generic bandit camps, monster nests and treasure-hunt map markers that function as pure Ubisoft-style icon-clearing rather than the bespoke writing the game is actually known for — padding that coexists uneasily next to the quests that made the reputation in the first place. And the two expansions, Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine, are so consistently stronger than a meaningful stretch of the base campaign’s late game that it’s a fair criticism to say CD Projekt Red’s best Witcher 3 writing arrived after most players had already formed their opinion of the game.

The alchemy and crafting systems, meanwhile, are the clearest case of a mechanic the writing team simply didn’t have time to make as interesting as everything around it. Brewing potions and oils requires ingredients scattered across the map in a way that encourages constant foraging, and the crafting tree for armour and weapon upgrades is deep enough on paper to look like a real system, but in practice most players settle on a single armour set — usually one of the Witcher Gear sets tied to their own dedicated treasure-hunt quest chains — and stop engaging with crafting meaningfully once it’s assembled. It’s a system built to the scale of the world around it rather than to the scale of what a player actually needs from it, and the imbalance shows.

Horse control has become something of a running joke in the game’s own community for good reason. Roach, Geralt’s horse, has a pathing and cornering model that struggles badly with narrow bridges, tight village streets and steep terrain, frequently turning a short ride into an unintentional obstacle course. It’s a small thing against the scale of everything else here, but it’s the one system in the game that never received the same care as the writing around it, and a decade of patches never fully fixed it.

Where it sits

The Witcher 3’s real influence on the genre is the argument that a side quest deserves the same authorial attention as a main one, an idea Baldur’s Gate 3 took even further by making nearly every companion’s personal arc a fully reactive story in its own right, and one CD Projekt Red itself would need to relearn — the hard way — when Cyberpunk 2077’s launch showed what happens when ambition outpaces the engineering underneath it. It’s also worth setting against Dragon Age: The Veilguard, a much later BioWare RPG built around a friendlier, lower-friction companion cast, because the contrast clarifies exactly what made the Baron and his questline land: The Witcher 3 was willing to let a character be genuinely unlikeable and still worth understanding, a risk fewer studios have been willing to take since.

The scale that still holds up

It’s worth being specific about what “open world” meant in practice here, because the phrase gets applied loosely enough elsewhere that it’s easy to undersell what CD Projekt Red actually shipped. Velen alone, the game’s muddy, war-ravaged first major region, is dense enough with fully voiced, fully reactive content that a player who only ever explores that one region will still encounter dozens of hours of writing at the Baron quest’s level of ambition — Skellige and Novigrad then double that scale again. Very few open-world games before or since have matched that density of hand-authored material against that much square mileage, which is the actual technical achievement usually credited, imprecisely, to the map’s size alone.

Spoilers below

The Baron questline’s darkest possible outcome — his wife, driven half-mad by years of abuse, becoming a hag deep in the swamp and the Baron ultimately hanging himself from grief once the truth is confirmed — is entirely avoidable through earlier dialogue choices, and the game never tells you that avoidability existed until it’s too late to act on it, which is precisely the point: consequences here are meant to feel like the world’s, not a game system’s. Ciri’s own ending branches three ways depending on choices made across the entire back half of the campaign — becoming Empress of Nilfgaard, retiring as a witcher herself, or dying at the Wild Hunt’s hands — and CD Projekt Red’s refusal to signpost which specific earlier decisions determine that outcome is the same philosophy the Baron quest runs on, scaled up to the fate of the game’s second protagonist.