Happy endings aren’t really a Witcher thing. You may wind up with an ending that’s less terrible than others for the specific characters you care about, but no matter what choices you make, somewhere, someone who doesn’t deserve it is getting screwed because of something you did.
If anything, the books are worse in that regard. A quick glance at the past few hundred years of Polish history makes it easy to see why.
All of those are the “good” choices (i.e., adding a point to the “Ciri lives” column rather than the “Ciri dies” column.) Well, rejecting the reward if you visit the emperor is “good.” The mere act of visiting the Emperor doesn’t factor into whether she lives or dies. Interestingly, I had thought merely visiting the Emperor, in and of itself, would cause Ciri to become empress. Turns out in order for that to happen, you need to not only visit the emperor, but make certain other political decisions (do a bunch of side quests that ensure Nilfgaard wins the war, kill Radovid, and side with Vernon Roche.) So you were able to visit the Emperor and yet not have Ciri become Empress, because you didn’t do all of that stuff.
Quite a testament to the writing AND the the voice acting, I think. They really did a great job with the characterization of the main players. It’s one of the reasons I was a little hesitant going into the TV show because I wasn’t sure if if the “canonical” voices being different might make it feel odd.
Many consider your ending the “best” ending in terms of Ciri and Geralt’s future happiness and I’d agree. But the one where Radovid dies, Emhyr lives, Nilfgaard subjugates the north, and Ciri eventually becomes empress is arguably the best from a greater good pov.
Meh, I’ll take my ending for the most part. I don’t even mind that Keira died in my game. Triss and Yenefer are a lot better.
Began Hearts of Stone. I apparently met this guy back in the main game, but I do not remember him. 
Wait, what? How do you get that ending? Not beat the final boss?
As I said in post #109 upthread, that was just a joke that when you die in the normal course of playing the game, you could construe that, story-wise, as an “ending.”
Oh, my bad. Of course!
Possessed Geralt is great.
Yeah - the wedding sequence is a fun palate cleanser.
That is what I’m doing now. It tried to move me on, but I saw that all the activities were still available and I’m doing them all.
The pig-herding trophy is actually one of the more useful trophies in the entire game, in my opinion.
I can tell they had fun with this one. I am not organizing a “sonofabitch i’m in” type heist crew.
Hearts of Stone is great. I think of it as a very detailed sidequest and it is more engaging in many ways than the main quest. I was invested in finding Ciri, but the Wild Hunt and many other aspects of the main story were only OK.
I am hoping Blood and Wine is great as well.
I thought von Everec was an interesting character but Gaunter O’Dimm didn’t impress me much. “Ooh, look at me, I’m a mysterious guy with undefined abilities who doesn’t do much other than hang around making cryptic remarks…”
I was way more impressed with Blood & Wine which just had more stuff: more upgrades for the witcher school equipment, more witcher abilities, more minigames, more gwent, more places to explore, just more more more. And I played it twice with two very different results, as opposed to Hearts of Stone which was basically the same no matter which choices I made.
Wow, I beat Hearts of Stone today. It was a reasonable expansion. I only paid $15 for the main game and the expansions, so I have no issue. It looks like it goes for $10 on its own and that seems legit to me as well.
I looked up what to do in the final sequence. I HATE timed puzzles. I had visited the professor who told me to challenge him to a battle of wits. I appear to have gotten the good ending, which is great.
I’ll start Blood and Wine tonight or tomorrow and after I beat that, I’ll go do the best sidequests I have left. Most stuff hasn’t been “failed” and is sitting there. I will probably look up a list of the best stories in sidequests and do those.
I am level 40 exactly at the end of Hearts of Stone. Grinding is near impossible, so the game seems to have guided me to 40 with only minimal impact from me. I’m a little ahead of pace, but hardly dominant.
The hardest boss battle in the game for me was the main brother in the Hearts of Stone, the one I was doing the wishes for. He absolutely killed me a few times. I had less difficulty with the final boss of the main game.
Was he a demon, then? Able to do time magic and nearly all he wanted. Like a devil of sorts.
I thought books or notes in the crazy professor’s house suggested that he was an evil magical tempter that appeared in all cultures.
Began Blood and Wine and I immediately see why people celebrated it as what other companies would sell as a full game. The new land/area is gigantic, freshly designed, and I was immediately hit with tons of new content.
I just read a list of greatest DLC’s ever released, and Blood and Wine was #1.
I don’t think he was characterized well. It just didn’t seem congruent for an evil supernatural being with godlike powers to look like an average bald middle-aged guy with what sounds to my ear like a working class English accent. I would have thought they’d make him more fantastical-looking, shrouded in dark robes or something, more like the Wild Hunt.
Did the mission in Blood and Wine where you unlock mutations, and I finally built the beginnings of one of these “builds,” using the Euphoria mutation. Even though I still don’t have enough ability points to unlock everything in it and thus am missing a few skills, it’s still extremely powerful. I just keep Archgriffin, Ekhidna, and Ekimmara decoctions active, and I’m virtually invincible.
Do you mean when you fight multiple images of him inside the world of Iris’s painting? The toughest boss for me in the whole game has actually been that stupid Ofieri mage.
Seeing that mutation was exactly what inspired me to try using the Alchemy skill tree the second time I played the game.