Unmarked Spoilers Below! You have been warned.
Fridge Brilliance
- Triss and Geralt:
- Triss seems unusually cold to you, and Geralt isn't exactly pleased to see her either in Novigrad. This is despite the way the player might feel regarding the romance. Then you realize that Geralt abandoned Triss to chase down Yennefer and has been gone for months now.
- The Rose of Remembrance is available in Triss' house and has died. This symbolizes Geralt doesn't love her anymore. A decision which was made without the player's input. Geralt can choose to start anew with Triss, though.
- Then again, Geralt isn't just the player character of the video games anymore. He's got all of his memories back now, which means he's ALSO the character from the books. Either way, the Geralt character has to acknowledge Triss lied to him about several very important things and this isn't easily forgiven.
- Radovid:
- Radovid goes from a smooth operator in both The Witcher 1 and 2 to a completely unhinged looney-toon in The Witcher 3. This seems to come from nowhere, especially with his intelligent conquest of both Temeria and Kaedwen. Then you realize that Radovid was never raised to be a ruler but had been made to be a puppet his entire life by Sigismund Dijkstra and Phillipa Eilhart. While he can imitate his Magnificent Bastard mentors, he's not anywhere close to their level of play.
- Radovid is also operating without advisors (his two best now being his enemies) and is attempting to lead a campaign against the strongest nation on the Continent all by his lonesome. It's no wonder the pressure has gotten to him and driven him insane.
- Given his slurred speech and rambling, there's also some speculation that Radovid may be drunk during the times you meet with him.
- It's also very likely he isn't sleeping much, if at all. Exhaustion can cause people to act snippy and paranoid.
- Whatever else he is, he is under massive stress, constantly afraid of a betrayal in his own ranks and painfully aware of how he's teetering on the edge of a knife in the war with Nilfgaard. His mental health has clearly suffered from all the pressures and paranoia. But in spite of everything he is still a competent wartime ruler, able to hold Nilfgaard back with his strategic genius. It just happens to come at the cost of everything else.
- His Disproportionate Retribution on the postmaster with the forged letter from Philippa Eilhart, with a bit of thought, comes off as the postmaster being Too Dumb to Live. "Oh, I'm going to forge a letter from someone who may very well have taught Radovid how to write and at the very least someone whose penmanship will be extremely familiar to him." One wonders if Radovid facepalmed before sentencing the poor bastard.
- Geralt can wander around Novigrad being a Witcher who works magic, performs alchemy, and showing off his obvious mutations with no sign of people turning him into the Witch Hunters. Indeed, the Witch Hunter commander, Menge, says he will be 'watching' Geralt so he doesn't step out of line. This seems to be a case of Gameplay and Story Segregation given they don't need any crimes to kill other nonhumans and magic-users. Then you remember Radovid is patronizing the witch-hunters and the King of Redania potentially owes Geralt a lot.
- The Witch Hunters themselves. Many of them, even their leader Caleb Menge, wear leather armor with only bits and pieces of metal on their costumes. At first, it shows how much of a step down they are from proper military units like soldiers, knights, and the Temple Guard, but it serves a second purpose: it protects better against elemental attacks. Considering that the most likely enemies of the Witch Hunters would be mages who can cast fire, ice, or lightning spells, it would make sense why most of their uniforms are leather overall, instead of metal, which conducts both heat and electricity and can even fuse or melt into flesh, which would be excruciatingly painful, as Imlerith found out the hard way when his fully-closed steel helmet failed to protect his face from being cooked by Geralt's close-up flames.
- A lot of gamers were confused by the fact there's a Witch Hunt going on in Novigrad despite the fact they may have rescued Triss in the second game and prevented a similar event from occurring. Dijkstra then explains that Radovid is only persecuting them in Novigrad—a supposedly free city. Radovid is using the Eternal Fire as a catspaw so he can indulge his hatred of witches and wizards while also keeping magicians as potential assets to help in the war against Nilfgaard. It also wins him points with the magic-hating Eternal Fire and they are the most powerful force in the city. Indeed, the only reason why the city doesn't side with Radovid is because the criminal underworld is making it so the city would be valueless to him if it did.
- Nilfgaard's Lighter and Softer portrayal in the game may in fact be a deliberate military strategy on their part, since a major reason for their previous defeats against the North in the books was the fact that their unprecedented cruelty drew the divided factions of the Northern Kingdoms together to repel them. Basically, they may have decided that rather than try to overwhelm the Nordlings with their sheer numbers and brutality to instead try an alternate tactic of psychological warfare, to make their enemy seem like the bad guys by comparison, for a change. This actually follows the books as in Blood of Elves, Nilfgaard switched tactics from overwhelming military force and genocide to undermining the North with a combination of economic warfare as well as exploiting social divisions (creating the Scoia'tael). Nilfgaard is way-way too smart to stick to any single plan for conquest.
- Sigismund Dijkstra's cover identity, Sigi Reuven, shares his real first name - a perfectly legitimate tactic used in real-world espionage to avoid instances of You Just Told Me.
- Why does your awesome-looking, monster-killing silver sword constantly wear out so fast? Silver is a soft, malleable material that's pretty terrible for making swords out of. Even in the books, Geralt mentions that using the silver sword is a special situation rather than a common practice and he often uses his steel sword instead against lesser monsters like drowners.
- Why does Geralt carry two swords when the silver-plated should be sharp enough? Silver will get blunted even faster on armor. The steel sword is used to prevent unnecessary wear on mundane foes that the silver sword offers no special effect on.
- You can give relatively small amounts of crowns to people to help them buy food or care for children, but the amounts you give them would barely help Geralt buy a single drink or bite to eat. This isn't Gameplay and Story Segregation, though, because not only are people wary around witchers and thus might charge them more money because they don't like them, a lot of shopkeepers will no doubt raise their prices simply because they know that Geralt will have a lot of coin on him, considering the fine weapons and armor he tends to wear.
- Should Geralt ask Gaunter for information on Ciri at the conclusion of his "game" with Olgierd, he responds that Geralt will find Ciri and that's not the real issue. He then proceeds to, without a single mocking grin or ambiguous phrasing, spell out the steps leading to the Golden Ending. Why? On one hand, Geralt just performed 3 impossible tasks for him, and that deserves a boon. On the other, Ciri's opponent is the White Frost, and Gaunter doesn't want his favored hunting ground smothered by an ice age. And on the other, other hand, Gaunter tells Geralt that he is a pleasure to work with and will certainly call on him again. He knows that if Ciri dies, so does Geralt.
- A minor one with the appearance of one of the Ladies of the Woods: Brewess appears to have a wicker basket on her face, which seems an odd choice for a mask, compared to Whispess. When you think about her name though, it matches perfectly - her mask is actually the bottom of a wicker basket holder for demijohn bottles. They are large glass bottles used for alcohol that are popular in European countries, and are considered traditional, especially in Slavic countries.
- She's actually just wearing a medieval beekeeping mask. She brews mead, and mead is made from honey.
- During each flashbacks about Ciri, there are different types of storytelling for each of the characters telling it. While the Bloody Baron and Whoreson Jr.'s are more or less straightforward, the rest of them have different ways of interpreting Ciri. The Crones have more or less painted her in a feeble light, making her seem like she can't handle simple drowners, and the corpse of Skjall paints more of her down time because he had a crush on her. Meanwhile, Dandelion paints a more epic ballad that while having respawnable enemies like the Crone's story, shows that she is able to handle fighting a couple at a time if done right, showing his ability to embellish stories to make them seem more epic.
- Why does the Nekker Warrior decoction make Roach more confident? Nekkers are pack-hunting Goblin expies and warriors are their alphas. Wild horses have a herd mentality for the decoction to exploit.
- There's a quest where Geralt and Triss are interrogating a Witch Hunter for information about Dandelion. He's seen too much, obviously, and a more humane Geralt will ask Triss to wipe his mind of the encounter rather than kill him. The victim still doesn't like it and protests as such, but Geralt reassures him with "It's not so bad... I promise." That's because Geralt actually knows what it's like to have amnesia; it's a significant plot point of the first two games!
- There's also the fact that as he's saying this, the person who took advantage of him having amnesia is literally standing in the room with him.
- Looking at the soldiers of all the Northern Kingdoms and Nilfgaard, it is easy to see why Nilfgaard has the upper hand - their soldiers have 16th century full plate as apparent standard issue (which is effectively impervious to a sword-blow and could take a shot from an early firearm with an even chance), but the Northern Kingdoms have 13th century gambesons and cuirass (still very good armour, but not as protective as full plate.) Think of Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire and his resources versus a High Medieval King, and you see how outmatched the Northern Kingdoms are. Their saving grace is better magic and no firearms.
- "Steel for Humans" is a pumping-up battle song, but the translated lyrics - a Bulgarian wedding song wishing the newlyweds health and happiness - don't seem to make much sense in a game about a wandering monster-slayer. However, consider where the song plays: the swamps of Velen, specifically around the Ladies' orphanage, where you travel to in order to help the Bloody Baron try to rescue his wife and make amends for the way he's mistreated her. The song suddenly becomes darkly appropriate for the area that you're fighting in, especially as there's a major setpiece boss fight against a monster sent by the Ladies to stop you, the Baron, and Tamara from rescuing Anna.
- Vesemir, out of all the witchers, has the fewest scars - practically none - despite being the oldest. But Vesemir isn't a normal witcher: aside from just being very old and therefore experienced, he was the swordfighting instructor at Kaer Morhen, so he was rarely on the Path. It also means he would have been the most technically skilled fighter, and the witchers' style involves a huge amount of dodging.
- Geralt can amass a fortune in this game that exceeds anything he could have ever hoped to accomplish in the books. It might seem like a consequence of transferring the setting into a medium where Money for Nothing is practically a trademark, until you realize where you get most of your money from. Hunting monsters in The Witcher 3 is not a profitable venture at all; selling your loot is, and you need to be at least a little business-savvy to yield the best profit because shops don't buy things at the same price. Geralt is simply able to get richer in this game because he's finding newer and better ways to make money outside of killing monsters.
- Near Oxenfurt you come across two merchants being attacked by the men they hired to be their bodyguards. After you kill them, the merchants thank you and give you the pay they were owned...a measly 20 orens that's barely enough to buy food for a single person, no wonder they turned on their employers.
- Eredin makes for a very anticlimatic final boss in this game. Remember the fight against him in the first one? He wasn't any more impressive then either. The King of the Wild Hunt was out of his league against an amnesiac Geralt by the time the first game ended; he was never going to stand a chance in one-on-one combat once the witcher recovered his memory and became more powerful than ever before.
- The Blood & Wine DLC states that only a Higher Vampire can kill another of its kind. This is because H Vs can recover from any injury as long as there’s blood in their system, as Regis explains when talking about how Dettlaff revives him. In the absence of modern tech, only another HV can drain a HV’s body of blood faster than the injured vampire can regenerate.
- In this game, you have the option of refusing to receive payment for your services a few times, despite Geralt explicitly pointing out in the first game that only very rich people (mostly nobles) can afford to do so. Gameplay and Story Segregation? Perhaps. But it could also be that, due to the war resuling in monsters running rampants almost everywhere, Geralt figures he can actually afford to not be paid for a few contracts, since there will be many more to make up for it.
- Why was the Duchess so generous in giving Geralt a contract on the beast of Beauclair? She could have given him a large bag of coins and he'd be happy as a clam, but instead she grants him an estate. It's obvious. She doesn't want Geralt for a job. She wants him to stay permanently as her vassal. Given the sheer number of powerful monsters and bandit lords in the area, having a world-renowned witcher to supplement her knights would be very beneficial. She doesn't know that granting said estate to Geralt allows him to finally settle down and fulfil his dream of a peaceful life with his significant other free of any danger, but it'll work to her advantage as he'd presumably be grateful for her finally giving him a home, and thus remain loyal.
- One somewhat glaring Gameplay and Story Segregation is the sheer amount of side quests presented to the player early on that Geralt can do, mostly in the form of Witcher contracts, but in other cases due to Geralt having Chronic Hero Syndrome. This can come off as odd that he'd be wasting time doing such things given he is desperately searching for his adopted daughter, so you'd think with how much of a Papa Wolf Geralt is he'd be ignoring all that to focus solely on finding her. But, this makes sense when you remember that all he knows about Ciri's current lifestyle is she's always on the move, and is utilising her training from him and the other Witchers to act as a travelling hero and monster slayer herself. She might be in-hiding, but she's going to need coin to survive just like anyone, which means she's likely paying attention to contract postings herself and might even have taken some up. Given he runs into both Letho and Lambert while on these side missions (And with Lambert, it's even a Working the Same Case situation too), it's not unreasonable he might by chance take up a contract and find out she's already on it, or cross paths with her while fulfilling it, and thus circumvent the entire main quest. This isn't to be as Ciri's current whereabouts and how she got there are a lengthy and complicated situation, but he doesn't know that until much later.
- Roche's justification for not defending a village against rampaging Nilfgaardians essentially boils down to: "it's not my job." That may not sit well with more morally righteous players, but it is justified. After all, if he's already working for Nilfgaard at that point, his new boss probably wouldn't be happy about him killing his soldiers, would he? It also explains why he wants to spare that wounded soldier.
- The morally flawed Bloody Baron and the kind-hearted Ciri get along very well in the Act I flashbacks featuring them together, which may seem strange considering how different their respective personalities are. Ciri's cheerful behavior around him can plausibly be the result of gratitude, since he helped her. The Baron is later revealed to feel a very sincere (if one-sided) love toward his daughter Tamara, who has some things in common with Ciri: both are tomboyish Action Girls and are the same age. The Baron helped Ciri and is so nice to her probably because she reminds him his daughter.
Fridge Horror
- Princess Adda can potentially live to become King Radovid's wife if you make the right choices in The Witcher 1. There's no sign of her, though, in Wild Hunt or even mention of the fact Radovid was her betrothed/husband. Given Adda was cursed her entire life and he has become consumed by Paranoia, it's entirely possible Radovid had her disposed of. Doubly likely given the Order of the Flaming Rose and Eternal Fire are patronized by Radovid. Both loathe a cursed product of incest like her (The Order having actually re-cursed Adda in the first game). And with Temeria in shambles, Radovid no longer needs her to solidify his claim on the North.
- A Higher Vampire can only be destroyed by another Higher Vampire... Hubert Rejk could still be out there, though it will take him decades to regenerate.note
- Or he might be lying. Seeing that Regis can regenerate his heart in moments, it's unlikely that a few cuts from a sword would injure him to the point he'd need a long time to heal. It's probably just a boast.
- He turns out to be a katakan, not a Higher Vampire, so he was lying.
- In the Nilfgaardian garrison in White Orchard where you get the griffin contract, if you turn on your subtitles, you can see the translation of a couple of Nilfgaardians talking. One of their comrades died — much to the shock of the soldier finding out, who exclaims he didn't think that anyone was capable of bringing him down. Turns out, nobody did; the comrade died of an illness. A fever, with black boils in the armpits. Those are symptoms of the Black Death! In the Witcherverse, this is known as Catriona, which Ciri brought with her from our world in the books. When Geralt arrives in Vizima in the first game, the city is experiencing an epidemic. And given that the invading Nilfgaardians are currently occupying said city, and White Orchard is only a day's ride from Vizima, they would have easily caught it.
- Velen is described by more than one character as a horrible, cursed place. When you hear that expressed early on in the game you think it's just because most of the place is a dirty swamp. Then comes the late game Bald Mountain quest. It gives you the final clues to put together what's really going on. There are these magic acorns the peasants are blessed with every year. They use them for medicine or fertilizer and occasionally they use them to raise the dead. The game helpfully provides some lore books in the area, and one of them explains that raising the dead never ends well, the magic always causes evil side effects and consequences. The population has been sowing their fields with necromancy magic for centuries. No wonder the place is cursed.
