The idea of player choice is a topic that’s been talked about ad nauseam, decades of discourse about how games utilize the player’s input and sense of agency. Hundreds, if not thousands of games, claim to have “important” choices for the players, worlds molded by how you interact with them. But very few have managed to succeed at that in the way The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt does. While The Witcher 3 felt revolutionary at the time, ten years later that feels even more true — as its influence is abundantly clear to see.
While the first two Witcher games had their share of fans, in 2015, the series wasn’t the gargantuan worldwide hit that it is today. In the decade since The Witcher 3, we’ve gotten three spinoff games, three seasons of a Netflix television show (obviously inspired by the games), a spinoff TV show, multiple animated projects, and more. All of that is a testament to the impact of The Witcher 3, and how the game crafted one of the most compelling worlds we’ve ever seen in a video game.
