The Witcher 3 has a habit of making an errand sound simple until you arrive and discover somebody’s family is cursed, somebody else is lying, and the monster might be the most reasonable person involved in this whole bloody thing. With Wild Hunt – Remastered arriving in just a few short hours as I publish this, it feels like a good time to revisit ten quests that show off just how good CD Projekt Red became at pulling you away from whatever Geralt was supposed to be doing.
I’ve included individual main and side quests from the base game, Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine since the Remaster includes both packs. This isn’t a ranking of entire storylines: each entry is a quest you can find in the journal, even if its impact depends on what came before. There are story spoilers below, particularly for the expansions. You have been warned.
1. Family Matters
Location: Crow’s Perch and Velen, base game
How to start: Meet the Bloody Baron during the main story and agree to find his wife and daughter.
Why it’s great: You can’t miss this one, and it’s quite early in the game, giving you an introduction into just how fucked up the world of Geralt can be.
The Baron first looks like the sort of loud, drunken local tyrant you can size up in five seconds. Then Geralt starts investigating what happened to his family, and every new detail makes that first impression less useful without making the man any easier to forgive. The botchling sequence alone could carry a quest, but it’s the way the investigation keeps uncovering grief, cruelty and self-serving versions of the truth that makes Family Matters linger.
2. Scenes From a Marriage — Hearts of Stone
Location: The von Everec estate, northeast of Oxenfurt
How to start: Progress through Hearts of Stone until Olgierd gives Geralt his final wish: retrieve the violet rose he gave Iris.
Why it’s great: An abandoned manor, a deeply unsettling caretaker and a trip through painted memories sound like plenty for one quest. Somehow they’re only the setting for the painful business of understanding Iris and Olgierd’s marriage. Each reconstructed scene gives you another piece of their history, and the final decision about the rose asks what helping someone actually means when they’re trapped in that history. The estate is one of the expansion’s best horror locations, but it’s Iris who makes it hard to forget.
3. A Towerful of Mice
Location: Fyke Isle, Velen
How to start: Follow Keira Metz’s questline after Wandering in the Dark and accept her request to investigate the tower.
Why it’s great: A cursed island covered in rats is an excellent place to leave the boat and immediately regret it. Geralt uses a magic lamp to piece together what happened inside the tower, and the story initially seems to offer a fairly familiar solution: find the ghost, hear her tragic tale, put things right. The trouble is that hearing a tragic tale and understanding the curse are two different things. It’s a brilliant little lesson in being suspicious of an apparently straightforward ending.
4. The Cave of Dreams
Location: Southwestern Ard Skellig, near Kaer Muire
How to start: After The King is Dead – Long Live the King, find Blueboy Lugos on his boat by the cave. You can also be sent there during Stranger in a Strange Land. Finish it before starting King’s Gambit.
Why it’s great: Blueboy Lugos has come to the cave to prove himself, and Geralt ends up joining him and his crew on a walk through nightmares made real. Hallucinogenic herbs turn the place into a procession of fears, stripping away the Skelligers’ bravado one by one. Geralt doesn’t get an exemption. There’s a spectral whale floating overhead, because apparently the cave was worried the whole thing wasn’t strange enough. It’s a short detour that gives the men more personality than many quests manage in hours, and it’s easy to sail past without ever knowing it exists.
5. Carnal Sins
Location: Novigrad
How to start: Complete Cabaret; the attack on Priscilla begins this follow-up side quest.
Why it’s great: Priscilla’s attack turns Geralt’s hunt through Novigrad into a serial-killer investigation. There are crime scenes to examine, victims to connect and suspects who are quite happy to give you reasons to hate them. The quest knows exactly how to use that anger against you: deciding someone deserves punishment isn’t the same as proving you’ve found the killer. It makes the detective work feel urgent without letting you forget that a hasty answer has consequences. And it turns out Geralt makes a decent detective. He’s definately got the voice for it.
6. Dead Man’s Party — Hearts of Stone
Location: Oxenfurt and the nearby wedding venue
How to start: Pursue Olgierd’s wish to show his dead brother Vlodimir the time of his life, then seek Shani’s help.
Why it’s great: Geralt gets possessed by Vlodimir von Everec and spends a wedding as an unwilling passenger in his own body. Vlodimir drinks, flirts, dances and generally treats Geralt’s reputation as somebody else’s problem, which is exactly the change of pace Hearts of Stone needs between its darker chapters. It’s funny, but the evening also gives Shani room to be more than the person who helped with the ritual. And once it ends, Vlodimir’s desperate grab at a few more hours of life stops being quite so easy to laugh at.
7. Beyond Hill and Dale… — Blood and Wine
Location: The Land of a Thousand Fables, Toussaint
How to start: During The Night of Long Fangs, follow the route to find Syanna rather than going straight to the Unseen Elder.
Why it’s great: A storybook world sounds lovely until Geralt meets the people who have been stuck inside it. Familiar fairy tales have become dangerous, ridiculous or both, and the place is full of details worth poking at instead of jogging toward the exist. The spectacle is wonderful, but travelling through it with Syanna also gives her time to talk. That matters when the expansion’s final choices are approaching and you’ve got to decide how much of her story you believe.
8. The Last Wish
Location: Larvik and the seas around Skellige
How to start: After the main story’s search through Freya’s Garden, meet Yennefer in Larvik before moving too far ahead in the story.
Why it’s great: Yennefer wants to find another djinn and learn whether the magic binding her to Geralt is the reason they’re together. This could easily have been a lore question with a tidy answer. Instead, the hunt through Skellige leads to a quiet, genuinely difficult conversation about what remains when an old wish is taken out of the equation. Your choice can define their relationship, and it works because the quest lets both of them face it directly instead of hiding behind another world-ending emergency. Who needs therapy?
9. Where the Cat and Wolf Play…
Location: Honorton, Velen
How to start: Take Contract: The Beast of Honorton from the Oreton notice board, then investigate the village after dealing with the necrophages.
Why it’s great: The contract leads to a village full of bodies and another witcher, Gaetan, whose account of the massacre is horrifying and, in parts, understandable. Geralt has to decide what to do with a man who was wronged and then did something much worse in return. The quest is short, but it refuses to give you a comforting answer, and the surviving child makes it impossible to treat the choice as a neat debate about witcher codes.
10. Equine Phantoms — Blood and Wine
Location: Pinastri’s Hermitage, northeast of Dun Tynne Crossroads in Toussaint
How to start: Speak to the hermit Pinastri about the invisible creature tormenting her.
Why it’s great: Geralt drinks a potion to see the creature. The unforeseen side effect is that he can now talk to Roach, who has rather a lot to say. That’s enough to earn the quest a place here, but the joke leads into the story of a knight’s ghost, the horse he beat to death and a chance to make amends. The Witcher 3 can turn a ridiculous premise into something unexpectedly tender without losing the humour. It also confirms that Roach has been putting up with Geralt for a very long time, which probably deserves its own medal.
There are painful omissions here. The heist in Open Sesame!, the tourney in The Warble of a Smitten Knight and Geralt’s dinner with a spotted wight in La Cage au Fou could all make a strong case. That’s the problem with choosing ten quests from The Witcher 3: even the ones you cut can give you a story you remember years later.
