The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt difficulty levels

You can go to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt for the story, or you can experience it, experience grueling combat and balance the different oils and potions during combat. It doesn't matter how you like to play, as long as you are having a good time. Fortunately, with a few tweaks to your game settings, you can choose the best difficulty settings to make your The Witcher 3 experience enjoyable.

The Witcher 3 difficulty settings

You have four different difficulty options when you first play:

• Just the story
• Story and sword
• Blood and broken bones
• Death march

The first two options provide the most comfortable gaming experience. You won't have to worry too much about using your potions, grenades, oils, or finding high-level gear to benefit your combat prowess. Instead, if you use the basic attacks and the right sword to fight your enemy, you can take them down with just a few hits when playing on those picks. You want to choose them if you're more interested in experiencing The Witcher 3 storyline, and you're not playing the game for intense combat experiences.

The challenge intensifies when you choose Blood and Broken Bones. You won't get as many experience points for completing tasks, enemies have extra health, and they hit harder than they normally would in lower difficulties. You'll want to play this if you're comfortable dodging, using oils, and want to rely on potions during combat. When you meditate, you don't regain any vitality, which means you have to use food or potions to regain it when you lose it.

The most difficult difficulty is the Death March. You only want to be on this difficulty if you've gotten used to parrying in the game, using your magic, knowing which oils damage enemies, and getting a wide variety of potions to improve your abilities. Much like blood and broken bones, you don't gain as many experience points, enemies hit harder, and they have more health. You will not be able to gain vitality through meditation either. You might want to play in-game on Blood and Broken Bones at least once before attempting this challenge, even if you've played other action-adventure games before. The Witcher 3.

You choose the difficulty at the start of the game, but you can adjust it at any time in the options menu. Pull it up in the middle of your game and go to the game settings to increase or decrease the difficulty, depending on how you play.