The 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. After Vesemir's pyre burns down at Kaer Morhen, Geralt gets two 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 next fifteen hours, 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. After the funeral, Ciri is sitting apart from everyone, wrecked over Vesemir and convinced she failed. Geralt gets two 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.

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 black Nilfgaardian thoroughbred instead. From that point on, whistling for Roach summons a black horse rather than the usual bay mare.
• Negative: "Thanks. Definitely need it more than you do." You get 2,000 crowns, and Ciri starts wondering whether the money was the point all along.

Two 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 Geralt is offered the chance to walk in with her and back her up.

• Positive: Let her go in alone. Geralt stays outside and spies through the keyhole, which is both hilarious and correct.
• Negative: Go in with her. Backing her up in front of a room of sorceresses reads as Geralt not trusting her to handle it, and it dents her confidence.

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 immediately 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 laboratory on Skellige, Ciri finds out exactly how much the elf has been managing her, and she snaps. Geralt gets a timed prompt:

• Positive: "Go for it." She trashes the lab.
• 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 whether there's time to find Skjall, the Skellige villager who helped her on the Isle of Mists and got branded a coward for it.

• Positive: Agree to go. This starts the short main quest Skjall's Grave, where you find out what the villagers did to him and Ciri gets to say her piece.
• 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, or back out) and Radovid lives. Redania keeps grinding on under a mad king, and the witch hunt in Novigrad continues.
• Side with Dijkstra and Roche, Ves and Thaler die. Dijkstra becomes Chancellor of Redania, wins the war against Nilfgaard, and starts industrialising the North on Nilfgaardian lines.
• Side with Roche and you kill Dijkstra and his men. With Radovid dead and Dijkstra gone, Nilfgaard takes the North, but Emhyr honours the truce and Temeria is restored as a vassal state.

Only that last branch permits the Empress ending. It is also, uncomfortably, the branch where a foreign empire conquers the Northern Kingdoms. The game is not subtle about the trade.

Skellige is decided independently, by whether you help Cerys through The Possession or Hjalmar through The Lord of Undvik, and by whose side you take investigating the berserker attack at the feast. Back neither and Svanrige takes the throne, which is the worst outcome for the isles.

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, when you tell her before she sails.

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 handcuffed to a bed, alone, listening to the two of them leave together. 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

Patch 4.0 rebuilt a lot of the game around it, but it did not touch the ending logic. The same five decisions, the same thresholds, the same three epilogues.

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 2,000 crowns; take the black Nilfgaardian horse instead.
• Let Ciri meet the Lodge alone and watch through the keyhole.
• 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 handcuffs.