The Witcher 3: five tips you should know before exploring the Northern Kingdoms

Prepare to lose hours of your life to this epic RPG
Epic: The Witcher 3 offers staggering scope and strong characters
Bandai Namco
Ben Travis19 May 2015

Have you been watching the latest season of Game of Thrones thinking how much you’d love the chance to run around Westeros, slaying White Walkers, hanging out with dragons, and spending a lot of time riding around lush landscapes on a horse?

If so, the closest thing that gaming can offer right now, aside from Telltale Games’ point-and-click Game of Thrones episodes, is The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Epic landscapes? Check. A world with warring human factions and a supernatural threat gathering in the background? Check. Dragons swooping around? Check check check.

The third instalment in the series is a mightily impressive role playing game (RPG), continuing the story of wandering Witcher Geralt, who sets off on a mission to find his former lover Yennefer, and his surrogate child Ciri. With a staggeringly huge open map to venture across, mind-boggling amounts of quests to tackle, and all manner of beasts to slay along the way, it’s a treat for anyone who’s ready to sink hours into exploring the nooks and crannies of the Northern Realms.

Having played through The Witcher 3’s opening hours on PS4, here are our tips of what to prepare for before you dive in yourself.

1) You don’t need to know the previous games

Don’t worry if phrases like ‘Geralt of Rivia’, ‘Temeria’, and ‘Drowner’ mean nothing to you – The Witcher 3 is a perfectly suitable entry point for anyone who might not have played the previous games in the series. Like any good RPG, the opening hours devote plenty of time to introducing the characters and settings – you’ll be up to speed and ready to go before you know it. Those deeply entrenched in the lore will still find plenty of familiar nods in the series’ return.

2) Set aside a good chunk of time to get into it

The characterisation in The Witcher 3 is particularly strong, and your emotional involvement in the game hinges on how much you care about Geralt’s quest to find Yennefer and Ciri. While this makes for an enriched story, it does come slightly at the cost of actual gameplay in the opening hours – upon putting the disc into your chosen console, you’ll likely to be itching to delve in and blast some monsters, only to be confronted by a slew of lengthy cut scenes. Some of these are more exciting than others – the opening battle is particularly jaw-dropping, with the disgusting (but beautifully rendered) visual of a crow burrowing into some poor blighter’s head through his eyeball.

All of this means that The Witcher 3 isn’t the easiest game to dip in and out of – you’ll want to play in longer chunks, especially at first so that you can haul through the opening exposition. Slightly annoying too is the fact that there’s no option to pause these cinematic scenes – once you’re in, you need to be focused or prepare miss out.

3) Explore as much as possible

Once you’re up and running (or trotting on horseback), there’s so much to see and do and try that it’s a little overwhelming. But when on your travels, take the time every so often to stop and look around – the world that CD Projekt Red have cooked up is just insanely beautiful. At sundown, the sky explodes in pink and orange hues, the water effects are possibly the best ever accomplished in a game, and the staggering scope of some of the vistas you’ll travel across simply demand to be seen.

Bandai Namco

It’s not just the views that you’ll want to look out for – as with most RPGs, it’s the side-quests you pick up along the way that not only give you huge amounts of extra gameplay, but really help the world come to life. Some of them are small (one mini-quest has you return an old woman’s frying pan to her), but often they spiral off in unexpected directions or lead to darker places than you might have anticipated from the initial mission statement.

4) Save your game plenty of times

Speaking of side-quests, you’ll learn early on that you should keep a few saves going as things can take a turn at any moment. During one side-quest, we found out that the person we were helping out had lied and was using us – at which point he promptly scarpered, and we lost him, never to know what the real story was. Both brilliant and frustrating in equal measure, we were so irked at the prospect of never learning the truth that we ended up returning to a previous game save to give it another go, managing to catch the bugger second time around. There are far worse things than nefarious humans to look out for too – at any moment you might suddenly come under fire from all manner of monsters too, from packs of wild dogs on the plains to Drowners in the swamps, which could lead to you unexpectedly meeting a sticky end. In short: save, save, and save again.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - in pictures

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5) Think about how you interact with the world

Where in the past RPGs quite clearly signposted the point where a huge decision must be made, this generation of RPGs can be a lot more subtle. A lot of the way you act in The Witcher 3 really matters – who you speak to, how you speak to them, who you choose to help, it all makes a difference. Part of the fun is in deciding who you might align yourself with, who’s fun to annoy, and who’s deserving of your help, but be careful not to burn all your bridges before you’ve even begun – you may regret it down the line.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is out now on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC

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