Four Witcher 3 Quests Almost Everyone Missed — And How Not to Lose Them

Imagine finishing a game at 100% completion and never knowing it hid a coup. Literally: Geralt can help overthrow a ruler on one of the Skellige Isles — and you’d never find out, because the trigger condition quietly closed fifteen hours of gameplay earlier. That’s how The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt works — a game where a decision made in passing can erase an entire quest from your playthrough, and you won’t even notice the loss.

That’s exactly what the team behind found after analyzing data from nearly 3,000 players who tracked their progress through quest trackers. The result turned out to be strikingly consistent: there are four quests that fewer than 12% of all players who finished the game ever completed. And it’s not because these quests are boring or tucked away in some forgotten corner of the map — you can only reach them through a fork in the story that most players don’t even know exists.

Which Witcher 3 Quests Turned Out to Be the Rarest

Here’s how the anti-ranking of completion rates shakes out:

Note that the list isn’t limited to side content — part of the main storyline made the cut too. A Final Kindness is technically part of the core narrative, yet fewer players saw it than many secondary quests. That’s a rare case where the missed content isn’t some optional quest for completionists, but a piece of the main story itself.

Why Most Players Miss the A Final Kindness Quest

The trigger condition for A Final Kindness sounds simple, but it hits an RPG’s most sensitive nerve — the consequences of choice. The quest only unlocks if the sorceress Keira Metz dies during the story. If a player made choices that kept her alive — which is what happens in most playthroughs, since saving an ally feels like the obviously “right” call — the A Final Kindness storyline closes permanently, with no warning and no second chance.

This illustrates a broader principle behind Witcher 3’s branching narrative: the game rarely flags that a specific decision is about to permanently lock away content. Saving a character looks like an unambiguously good outcome — which is precisely why the vast majority of players never learn what the alternative path held.

How to Get the A Deadly Plot Quest Without Losing It

The second-rarest quest works the opposite way — but it’s no less unforgiving. A Deadly Plot hinges on timely intervention: during the story, a character comes under attack by an assassin, and the player has to step in fast enough to save them. If the reaction comes too late and the NPC dies, the quest gets blocked just as permanently as with Keira Metz.

The key difference is mechanical: this isn’t about consciously picking the “right” dialogue option — it’s about physically reacting in time during combat or a cutscene. Missing a split-second moment like that is far easier than picking the wrong line of dialogue, which likely explains why this quest ranks among the rarest of all.

A Favor for a Friend and Matters of State: Quests Locked Behind Prerequisite Chains

The remaining two quests work differently — instead of one fateful decision, they’re gated behind a chain of earlier quests that has to be completed in full and in the right order.

A Favor for a Friend lets Geralt repay a debt to Simun Zyablik, a character who helped him earlier in the story. For the quest to even appear in the journal, players need to have already completed the storyline tied to that character — otherwise the game simply never offers this branch.

Matters of State is arguably the most intriguing entry on the list: it gives Geralt the chance to take direct part in a political coup on one of the Skellige Isles. It’s a lore-significant event, but reaching it requires clearing a specific sequence of earlier quests first — miss one step in that chain, and the coup plays out without the witcher.

Why It’s So Easy to Lose Content in The Witcher 3 Without Noticing

What all four quests share is the absence of any explicit warning that they even exist. Unlike many modern RPGs, which flag irreversible choices with a system message or a clearly marked fork in the interface, CD Projekt RED bet in 2015 that players should feel the weight of their choices organically, without a hand-holding prompt. More than a decade after release, that design still works exactly as intended: even veteran players who’ve finished the game multiple times only learn these quests exist through research like this.

How to See All of The Witcher 3’s Hidden Quests

If you’re planning a new playthrough and don’t want to miss these four storylines, keep three simple rules in mind:

• Before making decisions that affect allied characters’ fates (Keira Metz included), it’s worth checking a consequences guide — some choices become irreversible the moment you pick a dialogue line.
• In scenes with sudden attacks on NPCs, react as fast as possible — even a few seconds of hesitation can cost you an entire questline.
• For A Favor for a Friend and Matters of State, don’t rush through side quest chains just to check them off — sometimes they’re exactly what unlocks bigger quests down the line.

What This Means for Witcher 3 Players in 2026

It’s telling that a study like this is still surfacing more than a decade after release — that says more about how alive the community remains than any sales figure could. Players are still finishing The Witcher 3, picking it apart, and finding content that slipped past millions of people over the past ten years.

For anyone who already cleared their main playthrough at 100%, this is a great excuse to revisit Velen and Skellige — now you know exactly which forks to watch for. And for newcomers who haven’t started the game yet, the list essentially works as a “don’t make these mistakes” cheat sheet — one of those rare cases where a mechanical spoiler does more good than harm.