Witcher 3 Endings Guide: How to Get the Best Ending for Ciri

The single most consequential choice in a 150-hour game is whether you answer a grieving twenty-something with a joke or with a shrug. That is not a metaphor. A few days after Vesemir's funeral at Kaer Morhen, Geralt gets two timed dialogue options, one of them starts a snowball fight, and the game quietly writes a number down. Four more of those numbers get written over the rest of the main story, and their sum decides whether Ciri walks out of the White Frost or does not come back at all.

Nothing on screen tells you this is happening. There is no morality meter, no glowing icon, no "Ciri will remember that." Which is why a lot of first playthroughs end in Crookback Bog with Geralt hunting a crone for a dead girl's medallion, and the player sitting there wondering what they did wrong.

Here is exactly what the game is tracking, what every choice is worth, and what separates the three endings. Heavy spoilers from here, obviously.

How Ciri's ending is actually calculated

The game keeps a hidden tally of positive and negative points across five moments spread over three quests: Blood on the Battlefield, Final Preparations, and Child of the Elder Blood. Every one of them is a dialogue choice or a yes/no to a request. None of them is flagged.

The thresholds, per the Witcher wiki's breakdown of the epilogue quest Something Ends, Something Begins:

• Ciri lives (witcher ending): positive points equal to or greater than negative points.
• Ciri lives (Empress ending): 3 or more positive points, plus a separate set of political conditions.
• Ciri dies (tragic ending): 3 or more negative points.

One wrinkle that trips people up: the second scored moment only exists if you take Ciri to see Emperor Emhyr. Skip that visit and there are only four scored moments in your playthrough, so you need at least two positives out of four. Take the visit and you get five moments, but you also lock yourself out of the witcher ending unless Nilfgaard loses the war.

The safe play is simple. Take every positive option, every time. Then you are not doing arithmetic in your head during a cutscene.

Decision 1: The snowball fight at Kaer Morhen

Quest: Blood on the Battlefield. A few days after the funeral, Ciri is struggling to control her powers, swinging between rage and resignation. Geralt gets two timed lines:

• Positive: "Think I know what might lift your spirits." This kicks off a snowball fight in the Kaer Morhen courtyard.
• Negative: "Relax, you don't have to be good at everything." This one ends with the two of them getting drunk, and her mood does not move.

Worth saying out loud because people panic about it: you can lose the snowball fight. The point is banked the moment you pick the line, not by how many times you tag her. Throw badly, miss entirely, it does not matter. (The fight itself is first to 8 hits.)

This is the first number the game writes down, and the one most players miss, because "let's get drunk" reads like the warmer, more Geralt answer. It is not.

Decision 2: Emhyr's coin and the ending it unlocks

Still Blood on the Battlefield. Before you leave for Velen, you can optionally take Ciri to Vizima to see her father. This visit is not itself a scored point. It is a flag, and it is the gate on the Empress ending. No visit, no Empress ending, full stop. If Ciri survives without the visit, she becomes a witcher.

If you do go, Emhyr offers to pay Geralt for delivering his daughter. That payment is the scored point:

• Positive: "Didn't do this for the coin." Emhyr takes the refusal well and gives you a new black stallion Roach instead.
• Negative: "Thanks. Definitely need it more than you do." You get 4,000 crowns and a bill of exchange, and Ciri resents you for it.

Four thousand crowns is real money at that stage of the game, and it is still the wrong call. You will make it back on a couple of contracts. Ciri's ending you only get one shot at per save.

Decision 3: The Lodge of Sorceresses

Quest: Final Preparations. Ciri goes to meet the reconvened Lodge, and after she voices her nerves about the meeting, Geralt chooses between going with her and letting her handle it alone.

• Positive: "You'll do fine on your own." Geralt encourages her, and Yennefer ends up snooping on the meeting with him, which is both hilarious and correct.
• Negative: "Going with you." Geralt practically takes over the talking for her, which is the wrong signal.

The whole through-line of these five choices is the same: Ciri is not a child you are protecting anymore, she is a witcher-trained Elder Blood carrier who has survived worse than you have. Every option that treats her like an adult scores positive. Every option where Geralt steps in front of her scores negative. Once you see the pattern you cannot get one wrong.

Small side note that catches people: if you romanced both Triss and Yennefer, the main quest It Takes Three to Tango fires after this Lodge meeting, and it is unavoidable at that point because Final Preparations will not complete otherwise. More on that below.

Decision 4: Letting Ciri wreck the lab

Quest: Child of the Elder Blood. In Avallac'h's hidden laboratory in Skellige, Ciri is left raw after finding the place (and an Aen Elle woman who insults her inside it). Geralt gets a timed prompt:

• Positive: "Go for it." You and Ciri wreck the place.
• Negative: "Calm down."

It is timed, so do not sit there weighing it. Take the rage.

Decision 5: Skjall's grave

Also Child of the Elder Blood, right after the lab. Ciri asks you to come with her to the grave of Skjall, the young Skelliger who helped her flee the Wild Hunt and was treated as a disgraced outcast.

• Positive: Agree to go. This starts the short main quest Skjall's Grave, where you find out his body was thrown in a pit and Ciri gives him a proper burial.
• Negative: Tell her there's no time. She is furious, and the quest never happens.

There is genuinely no reason to refuse. It takes a few minutes and it is one of the better small scenes in the game.

Ending 1: Ciri becomes a witcher

Requirements: positive points equal to or greater than negative points, and if you took Ciri to see Emhyr, Nilfgaard must lose the war (ignore Reason of State entirely, or side with Dijkstra during it).

Geralt reports to Emhyr that Ciri died fighting the White Frost, then rides to White Orchard, where Master Ort hands over what he calls the finest silver sword ever made. You pick the inscription, and one of the options is Zireael, the sword's canonical name from the books. Then you walk into the White Orchard inn, a hooded woman turns around, and it is Ciri, alive. Geralt gives her the sword. She is a witcher.

The epilogue pays out a staggering 150 XP for this, which tells you everything about how CD Projekt weighted narrative payoff versus mechanical reward. The tragic ending, for comparison, hands you 1,000 XP. Make of that what you will.

Ending 2: Ciri becomes Empress of Nilfgaard

This is the one with the longest checklist, and the reason people miss it is that half the requirements are political side quests done twenty hours earlier.

You need all of the following:

1. 3 or more positive points from the five decisions above.
2. Take Ciri to see Emhyr during Blood on the Battlefield. Non-negotiable.
3. Nilfgaard must win the war, which means unlocking and completing Reason of State, then siding with the Temerian patriots (Roche, Ves and Thaler) rather than Dijkstra.

Reason of State is a secondary quest with a nasty prerequisite chain. You need A Deadly Plot done, which itself requires Triss's quests A Matter of Life and Death and Now or Never. You need to have obtained and resolved An Eye for an Eye and Redania's Most Wanted. And during the main quest Blindingly Obvious you must bribe Dijkstra with information about Emhyr rather than lean on him by force, or the quest never opens at all.

Two hard cutoffs to respect: several of those Novigrad quests fail or become unavailable once you sail for the Isle of Mists, and Reason of State itself fails outright if you start the final main quest On Thin Ice before finishing it. Clear the Novigrad board first. Always.

Do all of it and the epilogue is winter in White Orchard: a rabbit hunt that turns into a forktail fight, ice fishing with bombs, and a long walk during which Ciri tells Geralt she has accepted her father's offer. She hands him her sword and rides off with Morvran Voorhis. The one-off quest Faithful Friend is only available during this epilogue, so grab it as you leave the inn.

Whether this is the "best" ending is a real argument. Ciri gets the throne of the most powerful state in the world and the leverage to actually change things. She also gets a life she spent the entire game running from. The witcher ending gives her the Path and nothing else. Pick your poison.

Ending 3: Ciri dies

Requirement: 3 or more negative points. Nothing else can save it, no political manoeuvring, no romance, no gear.

You wake up in Crookback Bog. Geralt is hunting the last crone because she took Ciri's medallion, and the whole sequence is the game's way of showing you a Geralt with nothing left to protect. It is brutally well-made and I would not wish it on a first playthrough.

The thing worth understanding is that this is not a "bad ending" you get by being evil. You get it by being a slightly overbearing father figure five separate times in a row, which is exactly the sort of thing a player does on instinct.

The political endings that decide the North

Separate from Ciri, the game resolves the war based on Reason of State:

• Skip it (never unlock it) and Radovid lives and wins the war. Emhyr is killed for losing, and Temeria ceases to exist as a country.
• Side with Dijkstra and Roche, Ves and Thaler die. Dijkstra becomes Chancellor of Redania and wins the war for the North, and Temeria is claimed by the North.
• Side with Roche and you kill Dijkstra and his men. Emhyr wins the war under the truce the Temerian patriots negotiated, and Temeria becomes a vassal state of Nilfgaard.

Only that last branch permits the Empress ending. It is also, uncomfortably, the branch where Nilfgaard comes out on top. The game is not subtle about the trade.

Skellige is decided independently, in the secondary quest King's Gambit. It only starts once you have finished both Possession (Cerys and Jarl Udalryk's curse) and The Lord of Undvik (Hjalmar and the ice giant). The choice comes after the berserker massacre at the Kaer Trolde feast: whichever sibling you help investigate it is crowned in the follow-up quest Coronation. Back neither and King's Gambit ends on the spot, and Svanrige becomes king instead. King's Gambit fails if you start the main quest The Isle of Mists before finishing it.

Romance: Yennefer, Triss, or nobody

Romance has zero effect on Ciri's fate. It only changes who shows up in your epilogue.

Yennefer locks in during The Last Wish, when you tell her you still love her after the djinn is dealt with. That quest fails permanently if you have not finished it before collecting Uma from Crow's Perch during Ugly Baby, so do it while you are in Skellige.

Triss locks in during Now or Never.

Do both and the game notices. After Ciri's Lodge meeting in Final Preparations, both sorceresses invite Geralt to the Kingfisher Inn for It Takes Three to Tango, and the scene ends with him chained to a bed while the two of them leave with the wine. You lose both. It is also unskippable once triggered, because Final Preparations will not complete without it. If you want one of them, pick one.

What the next-gen update changed

The wiki's ending conditions list no 4.0-specific changes, so treat the same five decisions, the same thresholds and the same three epilogues as current.

What 4.0 did change nearby is worth knowing if you are running the current build. The djinn in The Last Wish had its stats fixed for level upscaling, so that fight is no longer the absurd wall it was on old versions with upscaling on. And Yennefer now leaves the New Port immediately after the quest instead of hanging around for extra conversation, so grab any dialogue you want with her before you wrap it. If you are building a character to survive Death March on this build, our Witcher 3 build guide covers what 4.0 shifted in the skill trees.

Quick Action Checklist

• Pick "Think I know what might lift your spirits" after Vesemir's funeral. Losing the snowball fight does not matter.
• Refuse Emhyr's 4,000 crowns; take the new black Roach instead.
• Let Ciri meet the Lodge alone ("You'll do fine on your own").
• Tell Ciri "Go for it" in Avallac'h's lab; the prompt is timed.
• Say yes to visiting Skjall's grave.
• Only take Ciri to Emhyr if you are committed to the Empress route, because it locks out the witcher ending unless Nilfgaard loses.
• For the Empress ending, clear Triss's questline, An Eye for an Eye and Redania's Most Wanted before the Isle of Mists, bribe Dijkstra during Blindingly Obvious, and finish Reason of State before On Thin Ice.
• Romance Yennefer or Triss, never both, unless you specifically want the manacles.