The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
About the game
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is the open-world action RPG that CD Projekt RED used to redraw the genre's ceiling back in 2015. You play Geralt of Rivia, a monster-hunting witcher crossing a war-torn continent in search of his adopted daughter, Ciri, while the spectral Wild Hunt closes in. Its defining quality isn't the combat —competent, never revolutionary— but the writing: even the smallest side quest carries its own moral weight, and almost no choice is cleanly good or evil.
A world to disappear into
The continent is vast and genuinely alive. You move from the war-scarred bogs of Velen to the bustle of Novigrad, the largest free city in the north, and on to the windswept isles of Skellige, with their clan politics and open sea. Each region has its own tone, its own monsters and its own small stories that rarely feel like filler. On top of that sit two enormous expansions, Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine, which many players rate above most standalone games of the era: the first a dark, contained tale; the second a luminous send-off the size of another game.
What you pay for — and what you don't
This is a buy-to-play game: you pay once, with no subscription and no microtransactions. The current release is the Complete Edition, which bundles the base game, its 16 free DLC and both major expansions in a single package; list price sits around $50, but it's routinely discounted below $10 during sales. Anyone who owned an earlier version got the next-gen update for free. It's available on Steam, GOG —DRM-free—, the Epic Games Store, the PlayStation Store, the Microsoft Store and the Nintendo Switch eShop.
Where it stands today
It's fully released and still actively supported. The reference version is the one that followed the next-gen update of late 2022 (the so-called Enhanced Edition), which added ray tracing, 4K textures, content inspired by the Netflix series and cross-progression across platforms so you can carry a save from one to another. In 2024 CD Projekt RED released the REDkit, the official modding toolset, giving an already huge and still-growing mod scene a proper foundation. The game has passed 65 million copies sold, landing among the best-selling RPGs of all time, and a decade on it remains the benchmark for single-player RPGs.
Who it's for (and who it isn't)
If you want a dense story and a world to lose yourself in for a hundred hours, little else comes close: it's the obvious gateway to single-player RPGs and, for many, the peak of the genre. That said, let's be honest: the combat can feel stiff next to more modern action RPGs, the interface shows its age, and the opening in Velen is slow before the world truly opens up. None of that sinks it. Ten years and several remasters later, The Witcher 3 is still the kind of game you come out of changed by, and the best place to start before The Witcher IV arrives.