The Witcher 3 assumes you already know its cast. It opens with old friends, unresolved arguments and a dead relationship, and explains almost none of it. Here is the map the game does not give you.
Short answer
Geralt, Ciri, Yennefer and Triss carry the main story. Dandelion, Zoltan and Vesemir carry its heart. Everyone else is either a faction — Emhyr, the Lodge, the Wild Hunt — or a side quest that turns out to matter more than it looked.
The core
- Geralt of Rivia — a witcher: mutated, professionally neutral, and constitutionally incapable of staying neutral about the people he loves. The game's tension lives in that gap.
- Ciri — his adopted daughter and the actual subject of the story. Her ending is the game's ending.
- Yennefer of Vengerberg — sorceress, Ciri's other parent in every sense that matters, and the most uncompromising character in the game. She is not written to be likeable and is far better for it.
- Triss Merigold — the other romance option, and the one whose Novigrad questline is the best thing in the middle third of the game.
Romancing both Yennefer and Triss is possible and ends exactly as badly as it should. That scene is one of the most quoted in the game for good reason.
See also: The Witcher 3 Ciri — another Witcher 3 answer people look up right after this one.
Kaer Morhen and the old guard
Vesemir is the closest thing Geralt has to a father, and the school's last real teacher. Lambert and Eskel are his surviving brothers, and both have side content worth doing before the story pulls them in. The Kaer Morhen sequence late in the game is the payoff for having spent time with all three.
Dandelion and Zoltan are the friends rather than the family: a poet who cannot stop making things worse and a dwarf who cleans up after him. Their Novigrad chapter is the game at its most relaxed, which is precisely why the rest of it lands.
See also: The Witcher 3 Blood and Wine — the same Witcher 3 question from the other direction.
The powers
| Character | What they want |
|---|---|
| Emhyr var Emreis | Ciri, as an heir and an instrument — and he is also her father |
| Eredin | Ciri's blood, to save his own dying world |
| Philippa Eilhart | The Lodge restored, with Ciri inside it |
| Radovid | Every mage dead, starting with the ones you like |
| Dijkstra | Stability, profit, and no sorceresses anywhere near either |
The Novigrad plot is mostly the collision of the last three, and which of them you help decides who is running the North when the credits roll.
See also: Overwatch 2 Character List — same shape of answer, different game.
Side characters worth going out of your way for
- The Bloody Baron — the best-written quest chain in the game, and the reason the Velen chapter has the reputation it does. Nothing about it resolves cleanly.
- Keira Metz — a sorceress with her own agenda, a romance, and a questline whose ending depends on a single conversation.
- The Crones — the most genuinely unpleasant thing in a game full of monsters, and barely a boss fight at all.
- Regis, in Blood and Wine — the best companion in the series, introduced in an expansion rather than the main game.
- Olgierd von Everec, in Hearts of Stone — the antagonist whose story is better than the main game's antagonist's.
Where the expansions sit
Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine both introduce casts that outshine parts of the base game. Neither requires you to have finished the main story, but both read better afterwards — particularly Blood and Wine, which functions as an epilogue to Geralt's whole career.
The Witcher 3 FAQ
Do I need to know the books or earlier games?
No, but the first hours assume a lot. Reading a summary of who Yennefer and Ciri are makes the opening considerably less confusing.
Yennefer or Triss?
Both romances are well written, with different tones. Attempting both is a real option and a bad idea, deliberately.
Which character has the best questline?
The Bloody Baron, by consensus, with Olgierd from Hearts of Stone close behind.
Does the Lodge matter to the ending?
Yes — how Ciri handles them is one of the choices that feeds into her outcome.
Start with the Baron, give Kaer Morhen its time, and the rest of the cast arranges itself around Ciri as the game intends.