Well that’s it then. I’ve finishedThe Witcher 3. Sure, it may be half a decade later than the rest of you, but I’ve done it. And I did it properly. I finished Geralt’s adventure (does that not sound like a side-scrolling GBA Witcher game, by the way?) with 78 hours of playtime, after eating up both courses of DLC and starting out deliberately attemptingtonotplay it like a game, and finishing it byspending hours hunting ingredientsin order to upgrade my armour.
From thecities, to theside quests, to the explosive finale withthatfake out (yeah it got me big time), The Witcher 3 has treated me well. After I engraved my new sword and watched the final cutscene, however, I headed straight to the internet to see what I could have won. It turns out there are 35 other endings I could have ended up with, based on a combination of decisions that I didn’t even realise mattered.
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I’m not ready to play The Witcher 3 all over again. Sure, I enjoyed my time with the game, but if I spent another 78 hours on each playthrough to see every possible ending, then that’s 2,808 hours spent on The Continent. To put it in perspective, that’s 117 days of non-stop witchering. I can’t do that. My body needs to sleep. I’ve got other games to play.
Of course, I could Google the other endings, but where’s the fun in that? Reading a fan wiki is nowhere near the same experience as watching an in-game montage with lovely illustrations and epic music. This will inevitably be what I end up doing, but I won’t be happy about it.
The other option at my disposal is to combine some of the endings. While there are 35 endings to The Witcher 3, I don’t need to see what happens if I romance Yen and kill Radovid and then play the whole game again to see what romancing Triss (ew) and killing Radovid changes. Guess what, Geralt is with Triss instead of Yen. This way, I could probably narrow it down to a few subsequent playthroughs, maybe trying things out on New Game+ and changing how I interact with Ciri at crucial moments.
Mainlining the story isn’t the best way to play The Witcher 3 though, so I will eventually resort to the wiki to read up on the alternatives. However, I’ll leave it a little while before doing so. I’ll let my ending sit with me, percolate my mind a while before seeing the other options. After three days’ worth of playtime exploring The Continent and forging my own story, the ending I saw felt like the culmination ofmyjourney. It was satisfying and genuine, representing the key decisions that I made in my playthrough perfectly. I felt likeIhad affected the fate of the world, and that other players may have impacted it in different ways.
What makes this so special is that some of the endings were decided early in my playthrough, months ago in real world time. Decisions that I’d forgotten about as I headed off to face a vampiric invasion in Toussaint were of utmost importance, and the ending tied everything up with a neat little bow.
I was subconsciously a little worried that The Witcher 3’s ending could never live up to the story I’d told during my playthrough, but I shouldn’t have been. The main plot is engaging enough, but how would any ending take into account everything else you’ve done on your journey? The key is wrapping up major plot points in side quests. You can completely ignore Dijkstra’s regicide plot and still finish the game, but your inaction will have ramifications. You can stay committed to Yen or sow your wild seed, but it will impact your life after you hang up your swords. In The Witcher 3, everything matters, and its endings reflect that. I’m just never going to see them all.
