Helps. Not necessarily required.
I’m trying to back here and make sure I did most of the sidequests. I can’t say I’ll get all of them, but I am making the effort.
I did Keira’s, the dwarf’s, Dandelion/Priscillas, Triss, and the Pellar’s.
Minor spoiler for getting the better ending to Keira’s quest.
There are three possible endings here. Killing her sucks, letting her go is no better because Radovid doesn’t forgive and doesn’t forget as you’ll point out. For the best ending, you have to get the dialogue where you warn her she is not going to make it, then suggest she go to Kaer Morhen to ride out the chaos.
Is it bad I’m not sure which of the two surviving ones I got? I think I got the best ending, though. I warned her where she was going was a suicide mission and she went anyway.
Well…they will end in two very different places. One is very much not great for Keira, though it ends in an impactful scene. The other is a mild aid to you, ends much better for her and potentially impacts the fate of another minor character. Also there is an achievement tied to it if you value those.
But again, strictly speaking not necessary.
Arrived at Skellige, level 20.
I believe I got all the essential sidequests completed so far in Velen. Most to a satisfactory conclusion, though I can see some different paths I might have chosen.
Going to Skellige is nice. I loved Novigrad and think it is the greatest city I’ve ever seen in a video game, but it was starting to get somewhat claustrophobic. I needed some new area.
I just did a side-quest called Shock Therapy.
-
It was rated “level 24”.
-
I scared a druid out of his self-appointed silence.
Easiest quest and not at all what I expected. 
I had a surprising amount of difficulty trying to get the pots to make noise!
I was down in the cellar while it was on fire and I experienced a glitch where Geralt would not use his signs or pull out a torch, etc. I thought things were disabled temporarily until he needed to use Aard to move some barrels.
I exited and came back in and had no issues.
Unless you were joking too, that was a whoosh. I was just joking about the idea that if you die, it’s an “ending” to the game.
I just finished the main story. One thing someone posted in the previous thread that I agree with is that you should look up a guide as to what choices affect the ending. (That person linked to this one, and identified it as “light on spoilers,” which I agree with.) These choices are not at all obvious, and you have no idea when you’re making them that they have a huge effect on which ending you get. In particular, the ones that affect what ultimately happens to Ciri are timed dialogue decisions, so you can’t even pause at that moment to look up which is the “good” dialogue choice; you have to go into the scene already knowing what to say.
A question for others who’ve played through the game: when I was looking up whether it was better to romance Yennefer or Triss, I came across guides that said there’s a point when they both try to seduce you together. That never happened to me. Could that be because I never really attempted to romance Triss? That is, when the mages were about to leave Novigrad, I didn’t say “I love you.”
Edit: I have yet to start Hearts of Stone, so I didn’t do this, but another post in the guide I linked mentions that if you haven’t finished the main game yet and you finish Hearts of Stone a certain way, one of the characters in it gives you explicit instructions as to how to get the “good” ending in the main story.
Which DLC comes first story-wise? Hearts of Stone or Blood and Wine?
Yes, you have to tell her you love her.
I don’t know that there’s any relation between them story-wise, but Hearts of Stone was released first and is lower in level, so generally that seems to be the one people play first.
IIRC there is a “story mode” difficulty setting which puts the whole game into very easy mode so you can just enjoy the story which is well worth it. You still have to fight but you need not be great at it to manage.
redacted.
Also, I never knew this until I finished the game myself, but I don’t think it’s a spoiler at all: when you finish the main story, you get a narrated storyboard-type scene, just like the ones that play when you’re loading or fast-traveling, that tells you what happens to all the main characters, who rules the various lands, etc. However, when that’s over, the game explicitly tells you that the state of the world it dumps you back into to finish any side quests or play the DLC, is what it was shortly before the final main story quest.
Let’s try this again with proper spoiler tags…
Surely you would just go back and play the entire game again, yes 
? I actually did get the worst ending my first time through. Quite dark, honestly.
Spoilered for romance endings.
You get a scene. But it’s a tease - they’re just fucking with you. It’s actually a bad ending because if you try to romance both, you get neither. Appropriately so, you two-timing cad 
. Either Triss or Yennefer can be a happy ending, but Yennefer is far more canonical.
Breath of the Wild style? In that game, after you beat Ganon(hardly a spoiler), it sets you back to just before you face him so you can go do whatever you want, including DLC(which were very sub-par in that game).
Witcher 3 sets you back before the final “point of no return” moment?
I was under the impression that the end of Blood & Wine took place strictly after the end of the main quest.
No way. I’ll never understand how people have the time and the patience to play through games like this more than once. I start a game I’ve never played before, it’s the only game I play for a month or two, I finish it, set it aside, never touch it again, start a new game I’ve never played before, and the cycle repeats.
Right, the guides I read mentioned that you should turn down their offer of a ménage à trois, because attempting to accept it will result in your losing both of them. But they seemed to imply that you will get that scene, and have to choose to turn down their offer. I didn’t even get the scene in the first place, which is what I was asking about.
I don’t know anything about Breath of the Wild, but in The Witcher 3, it’s not like it sets you back to an actual scene before the final battle. It’s just that when you complete the final mission, it gives you this epilogue saying “so-and-so settles in such-and-such place, so-and-so winds up ruling such-and-such-land,” etc., and then when it gives you control of Geralt again, it tells you “hey, the state of the world you’re in right now is before all that stuff happens.”