It’s rare in the world of video gaming that a series goes out on a high note… or indeed, goes out at all. This industry is a land of franchises and series that tend to continue indefinitely, even once they feel stale. Series usually only go away when a game flops. And usually this is a bad thing, but, with the recent release of Witcher 3: Blood and Wine, we face the opposite conundrum. The Witcher 3 is over. There isn’t going to be a Witcher 4. And that decision is respectable, admirable even, yet still somehow disappointing.

Wishing For More Witchers

The Witcher is a weird series. The first game was built on the Neverwinter Nights engine, years after that engine’s prime, and it had great worldbuilding and a compelling story, but not-that-interesting gameplay. Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings was a massive leap forward in quality, scope and technical prowess, and the storytelling was just as interesting. Then Witcher 3 came out and really blew us out of the water. It’s a tour de force of the open-world genre, possibly the finest example of it, and the first game to seriously overshadow Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. It had a deep story, great gameplay, and an incredible amount of fun stuff to do. And it reinvented a stale genre’s formula, sheerly through total commitment to narrative and character development. And the game was a huge hit.

There ain’t gonna be no Witcher 4. Not now, not later, not ever. We may see bits of The Witcher universe again, like in the standalone Gwent game, which was confirmed at E3. But the story is at an end, and CD Projekt Red has committed to that. Mass Effect ended and was born again. It won’t happen for The Witcher.

All that is okay. In fact, it’s a great decision to go out on a high note. But it’s still always a frustrating one. Fans still yearn for another Seinfeld season, or a sequel to Warcraft III. Long they shall yearn for another Witcher game, and that feeling is real. But it’s better than the alternative—a series that withers away when it is past its prime. I won’t name names, but there are many such games. You know them. You still play them, but sort of wish you didn’t bother. There’s not much there anymore.

More Witcher would be amazing—probably. But the Witcher we have is definitely amazing, and always will be. We shall remember it fondly, happy that CD Projekt Red never pushed the series beyond its natural life, even though we wonder what could have been. So we witch on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.