Revered as one of the best and most in-depth open-world games of the past decade, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt continues to draw players to its massive adventure nearly seven years on. Likewise, the game has inspired loads of fan works celebrating CD Projekt Red’s hit action-RPG, and it continues to do so, as one fan is proving by setting out to bring one of its more niche features into the real world.
Several things have helped to make Wild Hunt stand the test of time, the most notable including a massive and detail-rich world, a sizable cast of complex characters, and a heavily choice-driven narrative. However, one of the more underrated yet helpful tools available to players is its bestiary, which offers helpful summaries of the many dangerous monsters, creatures, and other supernatural beings they’ll encounter, as well as tips about which of Geralt’s signs, oils, and bombs, are effective against them.
Inspired by this, Reddit user ellie1398 has begun to recreate The Witcher 3’s bestiary as a series of hand-drawn illustrations in a notebook of theirs. Each page of the notebook looks as if it will feature the flavor text, tips, and artwork from a single entry from the in-game bestiary, as evidenced by the recreations of the entries for the game’s bears and panthers. Judging from the skill on display in just these two pages, it’s safe to assume that the ones to come will boast a similarly high quality.
Ellie1398 jokingly claimed that it will probably take them 10 years to complete the whole thing. That’s understandable, given the dozens of entries that make up the game’s bestiary. It’s a huge list that not only includes The Witcher 3’s bears and other beasts but a wide menagerie of monsters spread across groups like insectoids, draconids, elementa, and specters. That being said, ellie1398 won’t recreate all of these monsters, as they added in a reply to their post that they only have enough pages to include around 100 or so. This means 30-40 monsters won’t make the cut, but the ones that do will cover as much of the game as possible, including its DLC expansions.
According to another reply, ellie1398 will share an update on their project once they’ve made some progress. That may lead some fans to wonder whether said update will come before the next big update on the recently-announced new Witcher game. Not much is known about it at this time, other than the fact that it will be made in Unreal Engine 5 and mark the start of a “new saga” in the Witcher universe.
It’ll likely be a long wait before any sort of release window is revealed, which may be frustrating for fans who have already explored The Witcher 3 top to bottom. But if ellie1398’s bestiary project and other fanworks are any indication, the game will continue to provide interesting content of some sort to keep them entertained in the meantime.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is available for PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.