The Witcher

The Witcher arrived in 2007, when a then little-known Polish studio, CD Projekt RED, turned Andrzej Sapkowski's stories and novels into a dark action RPG. Geralt of Rivia was never a classic hero on a rescue mission — he was a hired professional who kills monsters for money, looks them up in a bestiary, brews his potions in advance, and keeps discovering that people tend to be worse than whatever comes out of the woods at night. That stance is what gave the series its identity: choices with no clearly correct answer, consequences that surface dozens of hours later, and Slavic folklore in place of the usual Tolkien furniture.

The second game, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings in 2011, brought an in-house engine, harsher combat and a story that split after its opening act into two markedly different branches. The peak, though, is barely disputed: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt from 2015, an open world in which even an ordinary contract about a missing child tells a complete story, extended by the substantial Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine expansions, each of which would stand up as a game in its own right. Wild Hunt raised the whole genre's expectations of what side content ought to be worth, and its later Switch port proved that world could be squeezed into a handheld.