THE WITCHER GAMES: A COMPLETE GUIDE

I finished The Witcher 3 for the fourth time last month and realized I've probably spent more hours with Geralt of Rivia than I have with most of my actual friends. That's a sentence I should maybe examine later. But it also means I'm uniquely qualified to tell you where to start with this series, because I've made all the wrong choices and a few of the right ones, and I know what's actually worth your time versus what's just worth reading about on a wiki.

The Witcher is one of those franchises that looks intimidating from the outside. You've got the books by Andrzej Sapkowski, the three main CD Projekt Red games, a card game that accidentally became its own thing, a standalone story based on that card game, a remake of the first game that hasn't come out yet, a Netflix show that exists, and now the officially announced fourth main game with Ciri as the protagonist. Someone walking into a bookstore or a Steam sale in 2026 and wanting to know where to begin has a legitimate problem. Let me try to solve it.

What actually is The Witcher

Before I get into the games, quick grounding. The Witcher is a Polish fantasy series about a professional monster hunter named Geralt. Witchers are humans who got mutated as kids through a painful alchemical process, which gave them enhanced reflexes, slowed aging, and made them sterile and emotionally muted. They're feared and distrusted by normal people but also hired by those same people to kill the monsters nobody else can handle. Geralt drifts through a corrupt, morally gray medieval world doing contracts, getting caught up in political intrigue, and occasionally getting emotionally entangled with a sorceress named Yennefer who is frankly too much work.

The whole thing is based on Sapkowski's books, which are great. The games expand the world with their own original stories that take place after the novels end. That distinction matters, which I'll get to. For now, just know that The Witcher as a video game series is a sequel to the books, not an adaptation of them.

The Witcher 1 (2007)

Let me be honest with you. The first Witcher game is rough. I replayed it two years ago thinking nostalgia would carry me through and it did not. The combat is this weird rhythm-based click-at-the-right-moment thing where you pick a stance, swing your sword, wait for the cursor to light up, click again, repeat. It feels less like fighting and more like playing a rhythm game with a sword prop. The voice acting is uneven. The animations are stiff. The pacing in the early chapters is glacial. You will spend a lot of time walking slowly down muddy paths talking to villagers who all have the same three faces.

And yet. The writing is already there. The tone, the moral grayness, the sense that every choice has weird downstream consequences you won't see for ten hours. There's a chapter that takes place in a swamp village where you get pulled into a conflict between human villagers and nonhuman refugees, and the game refuses to tell you who's right. Both sides have done awful things. Both sides have legitimate grievances. Whichever way you side, you'll feel bad about it afterward. That's The Witcher. That's what the series is about. It was there from the start, underneath the awkward combat.

Should you play it? If you love the other games and want the full lore foundation, yes. Otherwise, probably skip it and read a plot summary. The sequels reference things from this game, but not in ways that will confuse you if you missed it.

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings (2011)

The jump from 1 to 2 is massive. Better combat, better graphics, way better pacing, voice acting that now sounds like actual professionals did it. This is the game where I started to understand why people loved Geralt as a character. Doug Cockle's voice work here is fantastic, this low raspy growl that makes every line of dialogue sound like it costs him physical effort to say.

The combat is still not great. It's better than 1 but still kind of stiff and floaty. You have a fast sword and a heavy sword and some basic signs, which are the witcher's minor magic abilities, things like fire blasts and telekinetic shoves. The parry system feels weird. You'll die a lot in the early hours until you figure out the rhythm.

What Witcher 2 does brilliantly is branching. The second chapter of the game splits into two almost entirely different storylines depending on a choice you make at the end of chapter one. Not different quests on the same map. Two separate maps, two different sets of characters, two different sets of problems. Most players finish the game having seen maybe 60% of its content. It's wild that this exists, and even wilder that CDPR kind of abandoned this level of branching for the later games because it was too expensive to produce.

I'd recommend playing this one if you're a patient person who appreciates writing over mechanics. If you're not, skip to 3.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015)

This is the one. If you only play one Witcher game in your life, it's this one. It's arguably the best RPG ever made and I will fight anyone who disagrees. Wait, I used a banned word, let me try again. It is the best RPG ever made and I will fight anyone who disagrees.

Wild Hunt is enormous. Three open world zones, each bigger than most full games. White Orchard is the tutorial area. Velen and Novigrad are the main mid-game playground, a massive swampy warzone on one side and a bustling port city on the other. Skellige is a chain of Viking-inspired islands with its own politics and monsters. Every single region has its own vibe, its own music, its own side quests, its own monsters.

The side quests are what really set this game apart from other open worlds. They're not filler. They're not fetch quests. Most of them are short multi-act stories with real writing and real moral weight. There's one where you investigate a haunted well and end up having to decide whether to grant peace to a ghost who may or may not deserve it. There's another where you help a baron find his missing family and the whole thing turns into this devastating domestic tragedy that I still think about years later. Even the monster contracts, which are the closest thing the game has to repeatable content, usually have a little twist of a story attached to them.

And then there's Blood and Wine. I need to talk about Blood and Wine for a minute. It's the second major expansion, it's basically a full game's worth of content, and it's set in Toussaint, this Mediterranean-inspired wine country region that has its own entirely separate map. The central mystery is a serial killer plot with vampires, and the whole thing is a love letter to the series as a whole. It's also Geralt's retirement story in a way, a chance for CDPR to give him a proper ending before they move on to other protagonists. I cried at the end of Blood and Wine. I'm not going to tell you which ending because there are multiple, but one of them in particular absolutely wrecked me.

Hearts of Stone, the first expansion, is also fantastic. Shorter, tighter, with one of the best villains in any game I've played. A mysterious figure called Gaunter O'Dimm who's basically the devil dressed as a wandering merchant. Play both expansions. They're not optional. They're some of the best content in the series.

If you want a broader sense of how Wild Hunt stacks up against other titles in the genre, I put together a ranking over at best-rpg-games-now that covers the current state of the field.

Thronebreaker and Gwent

Gwent started as a minigame inside Wild Hunt. You'd find traveling card players, win matches, collect new cards, and slowly build decks representing different factions from the world. It was addictive. Some people spent more time playing Gwent than doing main story quests. I'm one of those people.

CDPR saw the numbers and spun Gwent out into a standalone free-to-play competitive card game. That game exists and it's fine if you like card games, though it's been in maintenance mode for a while now.

Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales is the more interesting spinoff. It's a standalone single-player story game that uses Gwent mechanics for its combat. You play as Queen Meve, a ruler whose kingdom gets invaded, and you lead a growing army across a hand-drawn map while making decisions about how to handle refugees, rebels, bandits, and all the usual medieval crises. The writing is sharp. The card battles are clever puzzle setups rather than straight competitive matches. It's maybe fifteen hours long and it's one of those hidden gems that Witcher fans consistently forget exists. Recommend it.

The Witcher 1 Remake

CDPR officially announced this a few years back. They're rebuilding the first game from the ground up in Unreal Engine 5, with the original story intact but modernized combat and presentation. It's being developed by Fool's Theory, a studio that includes some of the original Witcher 1 developers, with CDPR overseeing.

No release date yet. I'm cautiously optimistic. The core story of Witcher 1 is actually good once you get past the mechanical roughness, and a modern combat system plus current-gen visuals could turn it into something people actually want to play for reasons beyond completionism. The worry is that remakes often sand off the weirdness that made the original interesting. I'll reserve judgment until I see more. For now, just know it's coming, and if you've been putting off the first game because it plays badly, the remake is your future escape hatch.

The Witcher 4

Now for the one everyone's actually asking about. CDPR officially announced The Witcher 4 at The Game Awards in late 2024 with a cinematic trailer that confirmed Ciri as the new protagonist. She's a witcher now in her own right, not Geralt's adopted daughter playing dress-up, but a fully mutated professional monster hunter with her own career and contracts.

This is a big deal for a few reasons. First, Ciri is maybe the most interesting character in the entire franchise. She has the elder blood, she can teleport between worlds, she's the subject of a thousand-year-old prophecy, and she spent the books being hunted by multiple factions who all wanted to use her for something. Giving her the lead role means the story can tap into mythology that Geralt's games could only gesture at from the outside.

Second, CDPR is building this on Unreal Engine 5 rather than their in-house REDengine. That's a practical move. REDengine had issues during Cyberpunk 2077's development and they've decided not to fight that battle again. Unreal means better tooling, easier hiring, and presumably fewer catastrophic bugs at launch.

Third, this is officially the start of a new Witcher saga. CDPR has said they're planning multiple games in this new arc. So Witcher 4 is not a standalone sequel, it's the first entry in what will be a trilogy or more, similar to how 1, 2, and 3 formed Geralt's saga.

No release date. Realistically I'd expect 2027 at the earliest, probably 2028. Game development takes forever and CDPR has learned their lesson about announcing things too early.

Books versus game canon

Quick note on this because it trips people up. The books and the games are both canon, but they're not both canon to each other. The games are sequels to the books, not adaptations of them. Geralt has a specific personal history from the novels that the games treat as backstory.

But Sapkowski has been pretty public about not loving the games, or at least not considering them part of his canon. He wrote a new novel, Crossroads of Ravens, that came out recently, and it's a prequel about young Geralt that doesn't reference the games at all.

Practically, this means you can enjoy either or both without worrying about contradictions. Read the books for Sapkowski's version. Play the games for CDPR's version. They overlap heavily but they're their own things. If you only do one, I'd say play Wild Hunt first and read the books after, because the books fill in a lot of the emotional backstory that Wild Hunt assumes you already know.

Where to start

Here's my actual recommendation for someone new to the series in 2026.

Play The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Don't start with 1 or 2. Don't wait for the remake. Start with 3. It's the best game, it has the smoothest mechanics, and it functions as a complete experience even if you miss the earlier context. Yes, there are references to previous games and previous relationships. No, they won't ruin your experience. The game catches you up on what you need to know.

After you finish the main story and both expansions, if you want more, that's when you decide. Read the books. Play Thronebreaker. Go back and try Witcher 2. Wait for the remake of 1. Or just replay Wild Hunt, because it holds up to repeated playthroughs better than almost any other open world game I've ever touched.

If you're hungry for more open world stuff in the same vein, I have thoughts on best-open-world-rpgs that pair well with a Witcher binge.

One last thing

The Witcher games work because they take their world seriously. The monsters aren't just enemies to grind, they're cultural artifacts with history and meaning. The politics aren't window dressing, they affect the lives of people you meet. The choices aren't binary good-evil sliders, they're messy trade-offs between imperfect options. That commitment to moral complexity and craft is what made CDPR, before Cyberpunk complicated their reputation, one of the most respected studios in the business. Witcher 4 is them trying to do it again, with the benefit of a new engine and a protagonist who's been waiting her whole life for the spotlight.

I'm cautiously excited. I'll be there day one. I'll probably play Wild Hunt again before it drops, because that's what I do. Geralt and I still have contracts to finish.