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The Witcher 3 is an open world that opens in a fixed order. You get a small tutorial county, then a ruined marsh, then a city, then an archipelago, then a keep, and finally, if you own the expansion, a duchy where everything is level forty. Each of those places is where a different kind of question starts occurring to you, which is why this hub is arranged by where you will be standing when you need each guide rather than by category.
If you would rather have the whole thing as a single running order instead, the best quest order page sequences every main and side quest from the prologue through both expansions.
White Orchard: the county that teaches you the systems
The prologue is short, and almost everything in it is a lesson rather than content. You learn the sign wheel, you take your first contract at a well, and you meet the herbalist whose White Gull recipe you will still be using ninety hours later. Two decisions here are worth making deliberately: buy the Temerian set from Bram, because nothing better exists for another eight levels, and pick up the Serpentine swords from the graveyard and the ruins, since they are the earliest craftable blades in the game.
The other thing to settle early is where your first few ability points go, and the early skills page makes the case for the two that need nothing invested before them. Points are plentiful in this game; the slots to put them in are not, which is the argument the mechanics guide builds itself around. White Orchard is also the best place to start collecting the standing stones that hand out free points, since it holds six of them in a very small area, and our locations guide sorts every map marker in the game by what it actually pays you for reaching it.
Velen: the Baron, the Crones, and your first real gear
Velen is where the game stops being a tutorial and starts being famous. The Bloody Baron's questline is here, and so is the swamp the three Crones rule, and both of them end in choices with no clean answer. Our Velen secondary quests page lists the region's optional work with levels and prerequisites, which is more useful here than anywhere else because Velen has more side content than any other region in the base game.
Mechanically this is where three things start. The Griffin scavenger hunt becomes viable at around level twelve and is the first witcher set most players finish. The Quartermaster at Crow's Perch becomes the only merchant worth selling to. And the shorelines start paying, because drowners are the most efficient source of both experience and lesser mutagens in the game, which is the sort of thing the bosses and monsters guide is arranged to make obvious.
Novigrad and Oxenfurt: the city with the deadlines
Novigrad is where the game's one genuinely punishing design decision lives. Several of its side quests expire when the main story advances, and they expire silently. The quests guide is built entirely around that problem, sorting the bucket by which main quest closes each door, and the short version is to finish this city thoroughly before you sail after Ciri.
It is also the most useful city in the game. One quest unlocks the master blacksmith, another unlocks the enchantment system, and a third unlocks the man who buys monster trophies at a fair price. The NPCs guide sorts those people by whether anyone else can do their job, and the NPC locations page pins them on a map when you just need the coordinates.
Two soft systems come into their own here as well. Gwent goes from a curiosity to a hobby once the city's players are available, and the romance strands begin in earnest, with the caveat that pursuing both sorceresses ends badly for Geralt; the romance guide covers every option including the ones without their own pages. And by the time you are equipping properly, the ranked lists are worth a look: best swords for both blades together, best steel swords for the human half of the arsenal, and best armor sets for ten sets ranked by playstyle.
Hearts of Stone hangs off this region too, running from a wedding in Oxenfurt to an auction house heist to a haunted estate, all of it under Gaunter O'Dimm's eye. It is the tightest storytelling in the game and it is almost entirely linear, so there is no ordering to worry about.
Skellige: islands, ice, and a succession crisis
The archipelago changes what you fight. Sirens and ekhidnas come at you from the air and the water, ice elementals guard the good chests and ignore your fire entirely, and a large share of the region has to be reached by boat, which makes the crossbow suddenly central. The Bear scavenger hunt lives here and is the heaviest armour in the base game, at the cost of the mobility that kept you alive in Velen.
Two things on Skellige have deadlines rather than levels. The giant hunt on Undvik has to be done before the war council convenes, and losing it costs you the quest that decides who takes the throne. Yennefer's romance has its own expiry attached to the main story as well. Both are laid out with the rest of the walls in the quests guide.
Kaer Morhen: the keep, and the roll call
The witcher fortress is a short region with a long shadow. Its six secondary quests are only available until the second act ends, so they want doing in one visit, and our Kaer Morhen quests page lists all six with the level each expects and the one that needs an amulet from earlier in the game.
The Wolf School gear is scattered around the valley, which makes it the natural set to be wearing when the siege arrives. Who fights beside you in that siege is decided by recruitment quests spread across every region you have already left, and by whether a certain sorceress was sent here instead of to a king. That is the game's neatest piece of design and its least forgiving: the roll call is written long before the battle.
Toussaint: where the numbers get large
Blood and Wine is an epilogue region with a level thirty four door and quests that climb into the high forties. Almost everything in the gear ladder terminates here, because the only grandmaster craftsman in the game keeps a workshop in Beauclair. The grandmaster gear guide handles the top tier of all five sets in one place, and the school gear overview is the better starting point if you have not committed to a school yet, since it compares all seven sets by how they want you to fight.
Toussaint also adds systems rather than just content: a vineyard to renovate, dyes for your armour, mutations that finally raise the ability slot ceiling, and the one sword in the game that grows stronger permanently as you use it. The items guide sorts the whole bucket by whether a piece of gear climbs, arrives finished or gets burned through, which is the distinction that matters most once you have this much money.
The region's side quests are the most relaxed in the game and several of them quietly count toward the five virtues that earn that sword, so the pleasant content and the powerful content are the same content here.
Builds, difficulty and the second playthrough
Three pages exist for people who want to be told what to press. Best builds lays out the main archetypes end to end, from the Euphoria setup through pure signs, pure combat and the hybrids. Death March builds narrows that to what survives on the hardest difficulty, where enemies hit vastly harder and passive healing is switched off. And best silver swords ranks fifteen blades with the level and effect of each, which is the list to keep open while you decide what to socket a greater runestone into.
For a second run, the one piece of advice worth repeating is that New Game Plus scales the world up sharply and takes the Runewright away from you, so the shopping happens before you start it, not after.
PC: settings, mods and the two bugs worth knowing
The game asks a lot of a mid-range machine, and our PC tweaks page works through which settings actually cost frames rather than which sound expensive. On top of that, best mods covers the general quality-of-life picks, combat mods covers the ones that change how fights feel including the option to make enemies genuinely dangerous, and removing nudity exists for anyone who wants the next-gen redesigns toned down.
Two problems come up often enough to have their own pages. The bestiary not updating bug hides the very weakness information the monster pages assume you can read in game, and the missing downloadable content error is the one that stops the free add-on armour sets and the expansions from appearing at all.
Frequently asked questions
In what order should I visit the regions?
The order above is the order the game intends, and deviating from it mostly means fighting things twenty levels above you. The one real choice is when to start Hearts of Stone, which slots comfortably into the Novigrad stretch, and when to start Blood and Wine, which is written for after the main story.
What is the one mistake most first playthroughs make?
Advancing the main quest with side quests outstanding in Novigrad and Skellige. Several of them close permanently and without warning, which is the entire organising principle of the quests guide.
Do I need the expansions to get the best gear?
For the grandmaster tier, yes, because the craftsman who forges it lives in Toussaint. The base game still takes four of the witcher schools as far as mastercrafted, which is enough to finish the story comfortably on any difficulty.