Yesterday, I finally finished The Witcher 3, but the ending was not what I expected. It was so jarring, in fact, that I wanted to dedicate an entire blog post to talking about it. Call it catharsis, but it’s a conversation that needs to happen.

DISCLAIMER: Past this point, I’m going to be talking about the ending of The Witcher 3. If you haven’t completed the game, go no further. If you have – or just don’t care  – I hope you enjoy the post!

As I neared the end of the game, my counter was somewhere north of 80 hours. Everything before this point had been dedicated to exploring the game world, crafting items, completing quests, and building relationships. But now…now I was ready to end it.

The final few quests were fairly straightforward and soon I was fighting a string of bosses. I defeated them easily, then was treated to one final twist via the mouth of the big bad as he lay dying: Avallach, it turns out, had supposedly been using Cirilla for a certain measure of personal gain. This, however, turned out not to be the case.

In The Witcher universe, everything is prophesied to end with something called “the white frost”. Though sometime in the future, it is always said that this frost will sweep across the universe, devouring one world after another. Only one of the old blood can stop such a thing from happening.

Ciri had resolved to stop the white frost, but had been keeping that fact a secret from Geralt. She was afraid that he wouldn’t understand.

But Geralt (though my own dialogue option) did understand.

Having played the first game, I KNEW what the white frost was – what it was capable of. The same conflict encompassed the final mission of the first Witcher game. One of the old blood transported Geralt to the end of time, to see what would happen. Armed with that knowledge, knowing what was at stake, of course I understood.

So I watched as Ciri disappeared through the portal and I watched as she stumbled through the ice – a short montage of scenes playing as she looked at the white frost. Then the screen faded to white and I was treated to Geralt watching the portal close without Ciri returning.

The next scene takes place one week later. Geralt is trudging through a bog. He is searching for one of three “Old Ones”, witches that were a prominent part of the story earlier in the game. Two of the three were killed, but the last is still alive and in possession of something that Geralt wants – a pendant belonging to Ciri. He quickly finds the witch and dispatches her, but not before she can spout prophecy about how he is destined for death – would not survive their encounter.

With the last Old One dead, he searches its house and finds the pendant. Sitting, he holds it to his forehead as creatures of the bog begin to swarm the house. The camera pulls out and Geralt is surrounded, then it snaps to black and the title of the game, leaving Geralt’s fate unknown (though heavily hinting at the fact that he allows himself to be eaten).

What?

As the credits began to roll, I felt deeply unsettled. What the hell was that?

I immediately took to Google and found that there are, in fact, THREE possible endings to The Witcher 3 (major endings, that is…in all, there are quite a few more if you count all of the possible variations). And, apparently, I had managed to get the one considered to be the “bad” ending.

But how was this possible? What did I do to get this “bad” ending?

I did some reading about that and am less than pleased with the answer. Apparently, there are FIVE decision points near the end of the game – spread out across only 3 chapters – that dictate what ending the player gets. During these five interactions, there are options that are considered to be “positive” and “negative”.

The five interactions – and the positive/negative options – are as follows:

1. Immediately following the battle of Kaer Morhen, the quest Blood on the Battlefield has everyone picking up the pieces. With Vesemir dead, everyone is crushed, especially Ciri. Geralt goes to comfort her and is given two options. They are “Relax, you can’t be good at everything” and “I know what will cheer you up”. At face value, both of these options seem ok, but one is meant to be positive, the other negative. At the time, the former option seemed like the more comforting choice, but it prompts Geralt to get drunk with Ciri and all the other Witchers still at Kaer Morhen. Even then, the interaction doesn’t seem overwhelmingly negative, just that it’s making the best of a bad situation. The other option – “I know what will cheer you up” – translates into the two having a snowball fight. This is the more positive decision.
2. Following this initial interaction, Blood on the Battlefield gives you the choice of whether or not to bring Ciri to see her father, the Emperor. Choosing NOT to is the positive option. Further, choosing not to bring her to her father locks you out of one possible ending to the game. If you DO bring Ciri to see her father, he offers you coin for returning her. Taking the coin is the negative option here.
3. During the quest, Final Preparations, Ciri is asked to be seen by the Lodge of Sorceresses. She is nervous about this and asks Geralt to accompany her. NOT accompanying her is, apparently, the “positive” option. Going with her, despite her asking, is the “negative” choice. I feel like this particular set of options is unfair to the player and I have a few reasons for that. First, since Ciri asks Geralt to attend. Choosing to go with her because she asks you to – even if you decide to stay silent (which is a prominent option once you DO go with her) – is negative? Seems counter intuitive. Second, having played all three games, I have a predisposition towards the Lodge. In previous games, they were always involved in shady political deals that wound up always being a bad thing for those NOT members of the lodge. Because of this, there was NO WAY I was letting Ciri go in alone. Also, being able to actually attend a lodge meeting in the third game (after two whole games of only hearing hints about the lodge) is a once in a lifetime opportunity. Not attending seemed bad on multiple fronts. But, apparently, it was worse if you did attend. It is worth noting that all of the information  you could have learned from attending the Lodge meeting with Ciri is not ever conveyed to Geralt or Yen later. Ciri says something along the lines of “I’ll tell you later, I don’t want to talk about it now” but she never does.
4. In the quest, The Child of the Elder Blood, Ciri, Yen, and Geralt wind up going to Avallach’s hidden laboratory. There, they discover that he’s been doing TONS of research on Ciri and the elder blood bloodline. Further, they find an elf there that tells Ciri (and company) that Avallach has been lying to her and actually hates her. Hearing this from a strange elf Ciri has never seen before causes her to throw a tantrum and she says that she wants to destroy’s Avallach’s lab. The two choices given to the player are “Calm down” and “Go for it”. Of the two choices, one seems monumentally more mature than the other one: “Calm down”. This choice, however, is apparently the “negative” option. When choosing this option, Geralt tells Ciri to calm down, then educates her on the line of the Elder Blood, telling her that the power from that line is hers. He even gives her an amulet that he finds in Avallach’s lab – one belonging to the first member of the Elder Blood Line. The other option is that Geralt and Ciri wind up trashing Avallach’s lab while Yen watches disapprovingly. Overall, I felt like one option was reasonable, while the other was childish. Unfortunately, the option I felt to be childish – trashing the lab – was the positive decision.
5. After visiting Avallach’s lab in The Child of the Elder Blood, Ciri wants to make one last stop – to visit a young man she met earlier in the game – Skjall. Geralt and Yen reveal that he is dead and she wants to visit his grave. The two choices are “Let’s go” and “No time”. Choosing to go is the “positive” choice here while choosing not to is “negative”. This choice seems like a relatively minor one, but apparently holds much more impact than it seems like it should.

To get the “bad” ending, you have to choose three of the five “negative” interactions. The three I chose were telling Ciri “Relax…” (and drinking with everyone) instead of having a snowball fight (that I had no idea was going to be a snowball fight), attending the Lodge meeting with her (even though I stayed silent the entire time), and telling her to “calm down” instead of trashing the lab with her. Apparently, these three decisions build up a large amount of self-doubt within Ciri when she faces the white frost. So much, in fact, that she loses confidence in herself and dies…

My issue isn’t so much with the fact that there is a “bad” ending, but how that bad ending is chosen. Basing the ending on a few somewhat nebulous decisions late in the game feels like a dropped ball. There are plenty of other times when Geralt and Ciri interact with one another. And to a degree, I feel like some of those other times carry much more impact than the five choices outlined above. But because of these few choices above, it feels like all of my positive interaction with Ciri was made worthless. After reading, it’s clear that the goal of these five interactions was to gauge whether Geralt was treating Ciri like an adult – her own person – but I can’t help but feel like a few of these decisions don’t hit the mark, punish the player for being curious, or don’t inform the player enough of the consequences of each dialogue option.

For instance, had I known that “Relax…” kicked off a drinking scene that Ciri regarded in an overwhelmingly negative light, I would have never chosen it. Especially if I would have known that the other option was “super cool snowball fight…”. To me, this choice felt very uninformed.

Further, when given the choice to attend the Lodge meeting, I felt like the game punished players who already had an opinion of the Lodge. Part of the reason I attended was because Ciri asked me to, but the bulk of it had to do with everything that had come before. As I said above, the Lodge has always been selfish, dangerous, and Geralt (players who have played all three games) KNOWS that. Further Geralt (and the player) KNOWS that the Lodge is going to be privy to info he (and others) won’t have. That also informed my decision to attend. I wanted to know what the conversation was going to be about. I was curious, for my own sake. That curiosity wound up being an extremely “negative” choice, not because I wanted to be informed, but because I apparently wasn’t letting Ciri be her own person. Again, an uninformed decision that I felt unduly punished players (especially those who had played all three games).

The final decision I couldn’t really get behind was the one in Avallach’s lab. Letting Ciri destroy the lab was something that felt very childish. To me, there’s a bit of a difference between letting someone be their own person and letting someone be childish. Destroying the lab felt wrong, so I told Ciri to calm down. Little did I know that talking her down from wanting to throw a tantrum and destroy some dude’s stuff was “negative”.

The fact that these five decisions – decisions that felt overwhelmingly MINOR in the grand scheme of the story being told and the history between Geralt and Ciri – were enough to cause Ciri to lose faith in herself and die at the end of the game, felt cheap.

After 80 hours of play, I felt cheated. In my mind, the game seemed to be setting itself up for a specific ending – one that would tie a neat bow around the MANY hours of game play that had come before. Even as I was nearing the end, I could almost feel how the narrative would end. And, to be clear, the ending that I could feel the game moving towards was one of the other three endings available. That that ending was so brutally ripped from me based on five minor decisions that seemed of very little consequence was – I felt – unacceptable.

So, without even batting an eye, I reloaded a save from Blood on the Battlefield and finished the game a second time.

This time, I had the snowball fight with Ciri instead of the drinking scene.

This time, I let Ciri destroy the lab (though that still felt like the “wrong” choice to me when considering all of the characters and how they’d interacted in the game, thus far).

But when all was said and done, I wound up getting the ending that I had originally pictured (mostly…in my haste, I didn’t re-complete the mission to kill Radovid. This made the war go very badly. My perfect ending would have seen Radovid dead…): The world was saved from the white frost, Ciri winds up living and becomes a famous Witcher, and Geralt retires with Yen.

Watching that ending, I was very pleased with how it turned out for Ciri, Yen, and Geralt. Though I’m sad that I didn’t go back and do the Radovid quest (something I could still easily rectify), I feel that what ultimately wound up happening with Ciri, Yen, and Geralt – the second time I did it – felt right.

But despite that, I’ll always remember the FIRST ending…the “bad” one – the one that sees Ciri dead and Geralt grieving for the loss (and possibly committing suicide via death by drowner…). Though I did put over 80 hours of time into the game, I can’t help but feel somewhat disappointed about that outcome. And since I know it was determined by only five choices made in a span of only around three-ish hours of game play (instead of all of the countless of hours that came before that), I’ll always feel somewhat bitter.

Even now, I can’t help but feel unsettled by the ending I watched, hurt that the choices I made were interpreted as “negative” – wrong. It certainly didn’t feel that way when I was making them.

That being said, The Witcher 3 is still a masterpiece. When it comes to fantasy, the series stands apart and I can’t remember feeling this way about an RPG since I played Morrowind in college. For anyone that knows me (and know just how much I LOVE Morrowind), this is extremely high praise. And, honestly, I think the series deserves it – as does CD Projekt RED for so expertly adapting The Witcher books into such a fantastically detailed, and enjoyable trilogy of games.

I can’t wait to see what they do with Cyberpunk 2077…