With the runaway success of The Witcher on Netflix prompting a resurgence for both Andrzej Sapkowski’s novels and CD Projekt RED’s video games, fans that are looking to delve deep into the series’ lore are finding themselves curious about The Witcher timeline. The foremost question in their collective conscious is do The Witcher games come after the books? After all, if you’re looking to absorb everything there is to know about The Witcher universe, you probably want to do so chronologically.
Do The Witcher games take place after the books?
CD Projekt’s games do take place after Sapkowski’s books, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you should hold off on playing them until you’ve surmounted the eight novels that have been published thus far.
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Ideal reading order for The Witcher books doesn’t quite match release order and is as follows:
The Witcher book order of reading
- The Last Wish
- Sword of Destiny
- Season of Storms
- Blood of Elves
- Time of Contempt
- Baptism of Fire
- The Tower of the Swallow
- The Lady of the Lake
Set entirely after the events detailed in the books, the games should be played in release order:
Although The Witcher video games are set in the same universe, years after the events depicted in the novels, playing them first won’t spoil the narrative of the books. You’ll meet many of the same characters and visit some of the same locations, though the protagonist Geralt of Rivia suffers from amnesia throughout a large portion of the games and cannot recall events from the novels.
This was a convenient means of CD Projekt ensuring that players unfamiliar with The Witcher could easily get involved, though these years later it also means you don’t need to worry about diving in and experiencing the games as soon as you’d like.
