The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt closes out Geralt's trilogy and is the game that fundamentally raised the bar for what side content in an open world should look like. Velen, Novigrad, and Skellige aren't scenery dotted with icons but places with their own problems, where even a minor contract to kill a drowner often ends in a family tragedy or the discovery that the real monster walks on two legs. The Bloody Baron side story is regularly cited as one of the best pieces of side narrative in the genre's history, despite having no direct connection to the main plot about finding Ciri and the Wild Hunt.

Mechanically it's a compromise between the realism of the earlier games and smoother flow: combat combines two swords, Signs, a crossbow, and dodges, potion and oil preparation remains but the game doesn't require it on the lowest difficulties. Witcher Senses guide the player along trails and turn investigation into a mechanic of its own. The open world is enormous and yet hand-built — there's no generated content on the map, and every question mark exists for a reason. Music by the Polish trio Percival draws on Slavic folk tradition, and together with dynamic weather and a changing day-night cycle it captures the atmosphere of the source material more faithfully than anything before it.

The base game was followed by two expansions that stand on their own as full-fledged titles: Hearts of Stone, with a narratively polished story about the Man of Mirrors, and Blood and Wine, which added an entire new, colorful region called Toussaint and gave the series a fitting close. Wild Hunt collected over two hundred Game of the Year awards, sold in the tens of millions of copies, and in 2022 received a PS5 and Xbox Series version with ray tracing and content inspired by the TV series. For a large part of the audience it remains the yardstick against which every other sprawling RPG is measured.

Why play it: For lovers of sprawling RPGs, it's the title against which all others are still measured — with hundreds of Game of the Year awards and two full-fledged expansions on top.