With the 40th pick in the 2025 Desert Island Music Draft, I select:
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015)
Developer: CD Projekt Red
Publisher: CD Projekt
Game Director(s): Konrad Tomaszkiewicz; Mateusz Kanik; Sebastian Stępień
Musical Score: Marcin Przybyłowicz & Mikolai Stroinski
Genre(s): Action RPG; Open World RPG
Platform: PC
It seems criminal that I should be able to select
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt with the 40th pick in this draft, and just a couple months after it celebrated its 10th anniversary, no less. But I won't look a gift Roach in the mouth. While
Elden Ring hung its hat on mystifying opacity and grueling difficulty, and
Disco Elysium made its name on bold, inventive RPG writing, and
Baldur's Gate III emphasized maximal reactivity and player agency,
The Witcher 3 paved the way for a new standard of storytelling in modern gaming.
The first and second game in this series feel like light warm-ups for what CD Projekt Red would ultimately accomplish with its third entry. Set in the Northern Realms, the player inhabits Geralt of Rivia, professional "witcher", or monster slayer in the common parlance. The mutations that a witcher must undergo render Geralt an outsider and a freak to most, as he ventures from town to town in search of Ciri, his adopted daughter and the Lady of Space and Time. The overarching story is not particularly original. It is one of power and the forces that try to obtain it. However, where
The Witcher 3 really made its mark was in the many smaller stories that populate its world. It's a game well-known for the muscularity, originality, and excellence of its side quests, and it bears more worthwhile ancillary content than any one game should ever be expected to deliver.
Truth be told, the moment-to-moment gameplay in
The Witcher 3 is not particularly stout. Combat is a bit samey from one encounter to the next. Use of Geralt's "witcher senses" stops being novel very quickly. Traversal feels clunky whether on foot or on horseback. And the dialogue trees, while voluminous and full of choice, are not exactly rendered with much innovation. That said, most players who love
The Witcher 3 will happily endure a bit of gameplay tedium to experience the world of the Northern Realms as CD Projekt envisioned it, with its many-layered characters and the compelling stories that wrap themselves around even the tiniest of the game's villages.
The Witcher 3 also began CD Projekt Red's tradition of developing robust post-launch DLC. Its
Hearts of Stone expansion, in particular, features an absolutely stellar story in the "be careful what you wish for" tradition
. And while its enormous
Blood and Wine expansion is never quite able to scale the lofty storytelling heights of that first major DLC, its setting is absolutely dripping with charm and its a more than fitting coda for a character that the player grows to love in spite of all his rough edges.