I’ve been playing The Witcher 3 when I have time, which normally means early Saturday and Sunday mornings. The game is huge and a lot of fun, but I want to narrow the focus a bit, I want to examine some of the choices I made. I won’t get overly specific on quest details, but will give away how it ended for me.

When you get to the 2nd main area of the game, you’ll do an involved quest line that revolves around a guy known as the Bloody Baron. You’re looking for some information on your own daughter, Ciri, and the Baron has what you need. But the Baron’s own wife and daughter have gone missing and he won’t tell you anything unless you can track them down.

I tried to play my character, Geralt, like he is in the books. For the most part he doesn’t want to know details about anything except what he needs to complete the job before him. A lot of times I was able to choose a dialogue option that more or less said “I don’t care.” But the game gives you tantalizing hints before it gives you dialogue choices. As I worked on the Baron’s quest line I wanted to know more. When questions came up on why he was such a drunken ass or why his wife hated him or did he ever beat his daughter, I felt compelled to ask, even though I really wasn’t sure I wanted to hear the answers. As the picture of the Baron and his family became clearer and really started to fill in, there was no doubt the Baron was an incredible asshole, but he clearly was not the only one at fault. And you find out that he did eventually help Ciri, protecting her, letting her heal, giving her provisions when she left.

I never had any illusions the Baron and his brood were in for the fairytale ending. In the end the daughter wanted nothing to do with the Baron, and his wife ended up dying after a curse took its toll on her. What did catch me off guard was when I went back to the Baron’s castle and found him in the courtyard, noose around his neck, swinging from an oak tree.

As the game went to a cutscene to wrap up this bit of story and push me towards the next, I wondered if this was my fault. Had the choices I made, the questions I’d asked, the information I’d forced out of him, did they drive him to this end? If I had chosen differently would he still be alive, but heartbroken over the death of his wife and his daughter’s refusal to see him? Or would the story have played out differently? Perhaps the Baron and his wife could have gone their separate ways. In the end, nobody got away unscathed.

I never go back and replay sections to try for a different outcome on my first playthrough of a game. I make my choices and stick with them, even if they suck, even if they make my life in the game more difficult. But as I thought a few minutes about the ‘what ifs’ of the situation with the Baron, I considered reloading.

But, in the end, I put it out of my mind and stayed the course. I got back on my horse, trotted out of the castle courtyard, and headed out to find Ciri.