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Assassins of Kings is a short game that behaves like a long one, because it was built to be played more than once. A single decision at the end of the first chapter sends you into one of two entirely separate middle acts, and roughly a third of what we have written about the game is content you will not see on any given run.
This hub routes you to the right page depending on where you are: setting up, fighting, choosing, or clearing up afterwards.
Before the prologue is over
Two things are worth settling early. The first is your build, because abilities in this game cannot be unlearned and Geralt caps at level 35, which means you will finish with roughly two thirds of the tree unspent. Our talents guide makes specific recommendations in the Swordsmanship, Magic and Alchemy trees and explains why splitting evenly across all three is the trap.
The second is how you intend to fight. Our mechanics guide is the index for every system in the game, ranked by whether you can finish without it, and it starts with the two-attack-button distinction that trips up more newcomers than anything else.
Getting through the fights
Preparation does most of the work here. Coat the right blade, drink before the door rather than during the fight, and keep a Sign in reserve even on a pure sword build. Our bosses guide covers the two encounters that deliberately take that preparation away from you, one by making parrying impossible and the other by rendering your oils, poisons and adrenaline abilities useless.
For gear, the items guide sorts everything by whether you can craft it, only find it, or simply buy it from the right merchant in the right chapter, and covers the oils, bombs and runes that decide most fights before they start. Our best weapons roundup ranks the steel and silver swords side by side.
The choice, and everything it changes
Iorveth or Vernon Roche. Our quests guide places all of our walkthroughs on the path they belong to, so you can see at a glance which half of the second chapter you are getting and which half you are giving up, and it carries the puzzle solutions for the rune seals, the brazier order and the Guardian's Eye riddles.
If it is the forks you are researching rather than the routes through them, our choices guide runs from the prologue to the summit and flags the five that The Witcher 3 remembers, and the endings guide traces the sixteen variations back to their causes.
The cast
Our characters overview introduces the people the story turns on, from Geralt and Zoltan through to Letho and Sile de Tansarville. Two of them have relationships involved enough to need walkthroughs, which our NPCs guide covers, and the full set of six opportunities is in our romance guide.
When the game itself is the problem
This is a 2011 release with some rough edges on modern hardware. Our PC fixes page collects the crash, frame rate, SLI and Crossfire, audio and installation workarounds, along with a full walkthrough for remapping keys through the Users.ini file, which is the only way to rebind some controls.
For context on how the game did commercially, our report on CD Projekt Red passing eight million sales across the first two Witcher games covers the figures that preceded The Witcher 3.
Wherever you are stuck, start with the mechanics index if it is a system, the quests guide if it is a walkthrough, and the items guide if the answer is that you need better equipment. It usually is.