I got my first look at The Witcher 3 at E3 2013 (say that three times fast), and dutifully explained to PC Gamer readers that although Geralt may be a pretty wild guy and also a kind of hunter, that's not what "The Wild Hunt" meant. Truth be told, the term was new to me, too.
To celebrate its 10th anniversary, all this week we're looking back on The Witcher 3—and looking ahead to its upcoming sequel, too. Keep checking back for more features and retrospectives, as well as in-depth interviews with the developers who brought the game to life.
A decade and change later and The Witcher is now one of the world's most-recognized fantasy series—even my mom knows about the Netflix show, although I'm not sure if she watched past the first episode about the wizard with a sex tower.
The Witcher 3 is also one of the games PC Gamer has celebrated and covered the most in its 30-year history. We've got a special, sometimes strange relationship with the game (you may have heard about our tub obsession). For The Witcher 3's 10th anniversary, here's a brief history of that relationship.
The review: A time when PC came second
Cast your mind back to the distant past: 10 whole years ago. It's a long time in PC gaming terms. Steam Greenlight was still around, no one was talking about 'extraction shooters,' and even though we thought of CD Projekt as a PC developer, it didn't come as a big surprise to us that console review copies of The Witcher 3 were available before PC review copies.
"While review copies of The Witcher 3 were sent out for the PlayStation 4 more than a week ago, PC code is still missing in action, despite being pre-loadable on Steam," we wrote at the time to explain why we didn't have a review yet. "Bandai Namco tells us that this is because a big day-one patch hasn't been finalized on PC in time for today's review embargo, but will be ready for worldwide release next Tuesday."
(If it seems strange to see Bandai Namco mentioned there, it's another sign of how much has changed: Back then CD Projekt relied on Bandai Namco and Warner Bros to help publish physical copies of its games in Europe and North America, respectively.)
These days, it's more often the console versions that reviewers have to wait for while a day one patch is finalized and certified. How far we've come!
When we did publish our Witcher 3 review about a week after the console-focused outlets, we gave it a 92%. That's a very high score for us, although it was one notch below the score that appears on our Metal Gear Solid 5 review from the same year, which brings me to…
A brief FAQ about our 2015 GOTY pick
What game did PC Gamer award Game of the Year in 2015?
Metal Gear Solid 5 was our 2015 GOTY.
Did anyone argue that it should be The Witcher 3 instead?
Yes, they did.
Did anyone point out that it was kind of odd to give The Witcher 3 a 'Best Singleplayer' award even though MGS5 was also a singleplayer game, mostly?
Yes, I think a few people mentioned that.
PC Gamer also declared Death Stranding GOTY in 2020. Are you in love with Hideo Kojima?
Disagreements over how much to praise or not praise Kojima games has been one of the top causes of hurt feelings at PC Gamer in my time here. (Not joking.)
Do you regret not awarding The Witcher 3 GOTY in 2015?
Speaking for myself, I like that we chose to celebrate the systems-driven design of MGS5. Our GOTY picks often do align with popular opinion (Baldur's Gate 3), but there wouldn't be much point to picking a staff GOTY if our method were to try to predict what the most people will agree with, which would be better accomplished with a poll. MGS5 won on its merits, as determined by the PCG team at the time, and that will always be the best we can do.
(But I'm certain some of us who were around then would argue harder for The Witcher 3 if we did 2015 over.)
Was MGS5 PC Gamer's most controversial GOTY pick?
We picked Spelunky in 2013 and people were pretty mad about that.
The Top 100: From GOTY snub to #1
It may not have won our 2015 GOTY award, but it wasn't long before The Witcher 3 became PC Gamer's top game of all years. We publish a new list of the Top 100 games every year, and in 2016 we put The Witcher 3 at the top, unseating Mass Effect 2 and previous champions like Skyrim and Half-Life 2.
"Wow! Our game in top spot over all these amazing games on the list... I'm a bit lost for words," said Witcher 3 game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz at the time. "It means a lot for us, proving that all the hard work that we’ve put into making The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and both expansions was time well spent."
The Witcher 3 stayed in that spot until being unseated in 2019 by Divinity: Original Sin 2 (thanks to its Definitive Edition update). Original Sin 2 was unseated by Disco Elysium in 2020, which was finally usurped by Baldur's Gate 3 last year.
In our current Top 100 PC games list, published last year, The Witcher 3 sits at #6.
And now, the tub
We were just goofing off, really. We couldn't have known that we'd one day have a small but real connection to Henry Cavill soaking in a tub by candlelight.
It was Phil Savage, current Global Editor-in-Chief of PC Gamer, who started it. And there really wasn't much to it: We just overused a screenshot of Geralt in the tub in articles about The Witcher 3 because it seemed funny to do that.
People on Twitter noticed. Some of them were delighted. Others were mad about it. So we kept doing it.
If asked why we kept posting the tub image, I'd sometimes say that we simply didn't have any other screenshots of The Witcher 3, which once prompted a PR person to email me a press kit with more screenshots. We didn't stop.
For some, the gag was a political statement, and we did receive some angry messages about "double standards." I just enjoyed keeping the bit alive, but I do like to believe that Tub Geralt brought good things into the world:
- CD Projekt made a Tub Geralt statue and sent it to us
- And now you can buy your own Tub Geralt figure
- Someone made a Tub Geralt cake
- The first season of the Netflix show included a tub scene, and maybe they would've done that anyway because Geralt does in fact bathe, but the showrunner clearly knew it was a thing before the series aired
- Henry Cavill said that he tried to put his feet up in the scene but it didn't work (and he thought it "might have been a bit much" anyway)
- Someone made a PS1 demake of the tub scene
When "hot tub streams" became a thing on Twitch in 2021, the opportunity was not lost on us, nor on CD Projekt. With Netflix, the developer streamed Geralt cosplayer MaulCosplay reenacting the tub scene in advance of WitcherCon.
For our part, we streamed a loop of The Witcher 3's tub scene for hours, occasionally playing clips of Geralt dialogue from a soundboard. (Yes, one of us was manually playing sound clips for hours.)
We archived the stream on YouTube. Behold:
And don't forget Big Geralt!
A lesser-known running Geralt joke came about after modder Votislav posted a stretched-out Geralt face from The Witcher 3's files. We dubbed it "Big Geralt."
If I'm being honest, I like Big Geralt more than Tub Geralt. He's so serene, and he still appears sometimes when we write about ultrawide displays.
More of PC Gamer's best Witcher 3 coverage
We've written a lot about The Witcher 3 over the past 10 years. Here are a few more highlights:
- Our 2023 ranking of all the Geralts, which of course includes Tub Geralt and Big Geralt, as well as "Gerlat," a typo I frequently make
- The time writer Austin Wood wound up in an Atlanta sports bar with Geralt voice actor Doug Cockle
- Our feature on the making of The Witcher 3's best quest
- A breakdown of 30 little touches that show The Witcher 3's amazing attention to detail
- Faces of Novigrad, a series of Witcher 3 portraits by former PCG editor Andy Kelly
- And then there's everything we're publishing this week in recognition of The Witcher 3's 10th anniversary, for which we sent PCG's Josh Wolens to Poland to talk to 14 members of the RPG's original development team.
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