You know the moment. You hand in the last contract, ride Roach up a hill in Toussaint, and the music swells one final time. Then you start a new RPG, and within the first hour someone asks you to collect ten wolf pelts. It's not the same, and you know exactly why.
Most lists answer with the obvious: Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring, Baldur's Gate 3. This list assumes you've played those (and if you still haven't touched Larian's game, our list of games like Baldur's Gate 3 has you covered). What The Witcher 3 did best was smaller and harder to copy: quests that turn on you halfway through, monster hunts that reward preparation, and choices that come back two acts later with interest. Eight games that get at least one of those right, ordered from the closest match to the wildcards. No filler.
01
Action RPG / Warhorse Studios
Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
PC · PS5 · Xbox Series X|S
Play This First
If The Witcher 3's best moments were the small ones (a drunk baron, a village feud, a mystery that turns out to be about a family), Kingdom Come: Deliverance II is the closest thing to that feeling in years. You play Henry, a blacksmith's son in 15th-century Bohemia, and there's no magic to fall back on. You learn to read, brew potions by following an actual recipe, and fight with a directional combat system where a well-timed master strike beats any stat. Quests branch the way Velen's do, often quietly, and the consequences show up days later. The weakness: the opening hours are slow, and Henry starts out genuinely bad at everything, which some players will read as punishment rather than progression. Push past it and you get a world that reacts to you more than almost anything else out there.
The Hook: For players who liked Geralt most when he was solving a village's problems, not the world's.
Dragon's Dogma 2
PC · PS5 · Xbox Series X|S
Best Monster Fights
Geralt's fights are about preparation. Dragon's Dogma 2's fights are about climbing. You scale a griffin mid-flight, hack at a cyclops's eye and watch a chimera's snake tail flick your companion off a cliff. Those companions are pawns, AI party members recruited from other players' worlds, and they bring back what they've learned there: a pawn will point you down the right path because it has done your quest before. Fast travel is limited and expensive, so the road between towns becomes where the stories happen, much like Velen after dark. The weakness is the main plot, which is thin, and the quests rarely carry the moral weight of the Bloody Baron. Come for the encounters, not the writing.
The Hook: For players whose favourite contracts were the ones that ended in a fight worth telling someone about.
Dragon Age: Inquisition
PC · PS4 · Xbox One (also on PS3 and Xbox 360)
Best Companions
The Witcher 3 made you care about a handful of people around Geralt. Inquisition hands you a whole war council of them, and the camp conversations, loyalty quests and romances are where BioWare earns its reputation. The structure is closer to Skellige than Novigrad: big zones you clear, then leave. Its best trick is the war table, where you send advisors on missions while you're away and decide whether a problem gets solved by soldiers, spies or diplomats. The weakness everyone warns you about is real: the first big zone, the Hinterlands, is stuffed with fetch quests, and plenty of players quit there. Leave it half-finished once you can move the story on; you lose nothing. Get the Game of the Year Edition, because the Trespasser DLC is the game's real ending.
The Hook: For players who'd skip a main quest to sit by the campfire for one more conversation.
Monster Hunter Wilds
PC · PS5 · Xbox Series X|S
Contracts, Without the Talking
Every Witcher contract starts the same way: read the bestiary, pick the right oil, brew the right potion, then fight. Monster Hunter Wilds makes that loop the whole game. Each monster has breakable parts, elemental weaknesses and habits you learn by watching, and the gear you craft from it decides how you handle the next one. Fourteen weapon types each play like a different game, and the Insect Glaive alone could eat a month. Wilds is the most approachable entry yet, with a seamless open map and a mount that paths to your target for you. The weakness: the story is light, and the PC version struggled with performance at launch, so check current reports for your hardware. It's also at its best in co-op, which is a very different energy from Geralt's solo work.
The Hook: For players who read the bestiary before every contract and enjoyed it.
That's the first half: four games that each take one pillar of The Witcher 3 (the grounded quests, the monster fights, the companions, the hunt) and build a whole game around it. The second half gets stranger. Fewer swords, more consequences, and one entry that lets you play The Witcher in a completely different way.
GreedFall
PC · PS4 · Xbox One · PS5 · Xbox Series X|S
Most Underrated on This List
GreedFall is the closest thing to a mid-budget Witcher 3, and it wears that proudly. You're a diplomat on a newly colonised island, caught between merchant princes, a zealous theocracy, scientists and the natives whose land everyone wants. Quests are political: you can talk, sneak, bribe or fight through most of them, and the factions remember. Each companion belongs to one side, and their personal quests force you to choose. The 17th-century setting, all frock coats and muskets, is something RPGs barely touch. The weakness is budget: towns and dungeons repeat layouts, animations are stiff and the combat is serviceable at best. If you played The Witcher 3 for the dialogue choices rather than the swordplay, none of that will bother you much.
The Hook: For players who solved the Bloody Baron with words and wanted a whole game of that.
06
RPG / Bethesda Game Studios, Virtuos
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered
PC · PS5 · Xbox Series X|S
Best Side Quests Outside Velen
The Witcher 3 gets credit for fixing open-world side quests. Oblivion was quietly doing them well back in 2006, and the 2025 remaster makes it easy to see why. The Dark Brotherhood questline, the painting you climb inside, the village of Hackdirt where everyone is hiding something: these are short stories with twists, the same kind The Witcher 3 used to lift its world. Unlike Geralt, you're nobody, so you can join every guild and play any role. The weakness is that the remaster rebuilt the visuals far more than the design underneath. The Oblivion gates still repeat, and level-scaled enemies can make the world feel flat. Skip the gates and follow the guilds. If you've already played Bethesda's newer worlds, our list of games that do what Starfield promised picks up from there.
The Hook: For players whose favourite Witcher quests were the ones they stumbled into on the way somewhere else.
Disco Elysium – The Final Cut
PC · PS4 · PS5 · Xbox One · Xbox Series X|S · Nintendo Switch
Odd One Out, Worth It
No combat. No monsters. Still the best answer on this list to "which game makes choices feel like The Witcher 3?" You play a detective who wakes up with no memory and a murder to solve in a broken port city, and your 24 skills are voices in your head that argue with you and with each other. Failing a check is often more interesting than passing one. The Final Cut adds full voice acting and new political quests. Where The Witcher 3 asks you to pick the lesser evil, Disco Elysium asks who you were before you made all those choices. The weakness is obvious: it's almost entirely reading, and if you came to The Witcher 3 for the sword fights, this will feel like homework. Go in cold; spoilers would ruin it.
The Hook: For players who reloaded saves not to win, but to see what else could have gone wrong.
08
RPG / Strategy / CD Projekt Red
Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales
PC · PS4 · Xbox One · Nintendo Switch · iOS · Android
Back to the Continent
If what you really miss is the Continent itself, Thronebreaker is the most overlooked Witcher game there is. You play Meve, queen of Lyria and Rivia, leading an army through the Nilfgaardian invasion that comes before the events of The Witcher 3. Exploration happens on an illustrated map, and fights play out as Gwent-style card battles, with puzzle encounters that bend the rules. The writing is CD Projekt Red at full strength: decisions cost you soldiers, morale and, more than once, people you liked. The weakness: if you walked past every Gwent table in The Witcher 3, the card battles may never click, and the puzzle fights can feel like trial and error. If you built a Northern Realms deck before finishing the main quest, start here.
The Hook: For players who'd rather lead the war than ride around its edges.
What these eight games keep proving is that The Witcher 3's legacy isn't its size. Plenty of open worlds are bigger. It's the idea that a side quest can be the best story in the game, that a monster can be a tragedy, and that the right choice usually costs something. Studios keep borrowing pieces of that. Almost none have taken all of it at once, which is why, eleven years on, The Witcher 3 just hit its biggest Steam peak ever.
Frequently asked questions
What's the closest game to The Witcher 3?
Kingdom Come: Deliverance II comes closest for quests that branch quietly and a world that reacts to what you do. If it's the monster hunting you miss most, Dragon's Dogma 2 is the better match. Neither has Geralt, but both get the feeling of a road where anything can happen.
Should I play Cyberpunk 2077 after The Witcher 3?
Yes, if you haven't already. It comes from the same studio, and its side quests have the same habit of turning on you halfway through. We left it off this list because most Witcher 3 fans have already played it, and its 2.0 update in 2023 made it a far better game than the one that launched.
Do I need to play Thronebreaker before or after The Witcher 3?
Either works. Thronebreaker is a standalone story set on the same Continent during the Nilfgaardian invasion, before the events of The Witcher 3. It's a good way to stay in that world once you've finished Geralt's story, and it needs no knowledge of the other games.
Which game on this list is the hardest?
Kingdom Come: Deliverance II is the hardest to get into, because Henry starts out weak at fighting, reading and almost everything else. Monster Hunter Wilds gets the toughest later on, when hunts demand you learn each monster's patterns. Disco Elysium has no combat at all, but its skill checks can still knock you flat.
Which of these games can I play on Nintendo Switch?
Disco Elysium – The Final Cut and Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales are both on the original Nintendo Switch. The rest of this list is on PC and PlayStation or Xbox consoles, so check each store page for current versions before you buy.
Which of these filled the Geralt-shaped hole for you, and what did we leave off?
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