The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt Walkthrough and Guide

Before we begin there are several issues that need to be addressed, the first being the intent of this guide. The Witcher 3 is a HUGE game. It will very likely be the Game of the Year and if not, it is certainly a contended for it.

That said, it should be understood that the function of this Walkthrough and Guide is just that - a guide to help you get through the story that IS The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. It was not created to be a massive reference guide to the game, or an encyclopedia of all things Witcher.

What it is meant to do is help you get through the story - and especially the tricky parts - as well as make the most of your game play.

The game has the classic adventure structure, consisting of a Prologue and Three Acts. It makes very good use of its early tutorial phase, and if you have played the previous games in the series, much of what you will encounter actually makes sense.

If you have not played the previous games, oh man you have some catching up to do. So we should start there...

The Witcher saga at this point is all about the protagonist - Geralt - who is our hero - and his lost (some might even say estranged sort of) love, Yennefer. Added to the mix is his adopted daughter, Ciri.

You know the basics of who now - but not their backstory and perhaps more important, the chain of events that brought us to that point.

To address this, we are including a section of the guide called Background. If you are not a returning player - or if you have been too long away from the game series - it would be an idea for you to read that section FIRST. Before you play. Seriously.

You need to be aware of one other thing before you continue on in our guide and in the game - this is NOT like the previous games in the series. For the first time the wizards behind the Witcher series have opted to invest their efforts in the creation of an open-world game. A truly HUGE open-world game at that.

The previous games in the series were, despite significant efforts to make it seem otherwise, rail-based story action-adventure games. This time around they threw the baby out with the bathwater and started from scratch. And it not only shows, it is pretty cool!

Now that we have covered the basics and explained the path we are about to embark upon there are a few other things you need to know...

Bugs

Installation Issues -- for a small percentage of players - ourselves included - the installation process that the game automatically initiates can stop working or go very very slow.

We experienced this when we initially tried to install - and then reinstall - the game on day one, and it was frustrating. What we discovered though - after two days of repeated efforts - was that the culprit was not the game as such, but the storage we were using.

When we switched the destination from our external hard drive to the internal drive on the Xbox One the game instantly kicked into the installation process and completed in under an hour. So if you run into that bug, and you are using an external drive as well as internal, bear that in mind.

There are some. Right from the get-go. The major bug that you are most likely to encounter arrived as part of the Day-0 patch (or launch patch) and it has an unfortunate effect of messing up the frame rates on the Cut Scenes in the game.

That can be a source of significant frustration if you are a gamer who likes to view each CS in its entirety and who values the CS as a major story telling element (which it is). But on the other hand, while the Day-0 Patch messes with the CS's it ALSO fixes a lot of game play issues - so whether you opt to apply it or not comes down to whether or not you are willing to tolerate random bugs in the actual game play...

Personally we applied it. Because smooth game play is a bit more important to us than CS entertainment. Just saying.