When to play Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine
Hearts of Stone slots into the main game around level 32. Blood and Wine is the epilogue and spoils the ending if you start it early.
Contents
Play them in release order: the main story, then Hearts of Stone, then Blood and Wine — and of the two, only Blood and Wine is genuinely position-sensitive. Hearts of Stone is a side story you can pick up mid-campaign once you're around level 32. Blood and Wine is written as Geralt's epilogue, and starting it before you've finished the Wild Hunt hands you ending material you haven't earned yet.
Hearts of Stone: level 32, and it doesn't wait for the main story
Hearts of Stone opens with the contract Evil's Soft First Touches, posted on the notice board at the Seven Cats Inn. Its suggested level is 32.
Treat that 32 as a floor rather than a target. The expansion's hardest fight is one of the toughest duels in the game, and coming at it a few levels higher — the high thirties — is the difference between a fair fight and a wall. If you hit it underlevelled, the sane move is to walk away, clear contracts elsewhere and come back.
What makes Hearts of Stone flexible is that it barely touches the main plot. It's largely self-contained, so dropping it into the middle of your campaign costs you nothing in story coherence — which is exactly why it works as a mid-game detour rather than post-game content.
Blood and Wine: last, and that isn't a preference
Blood and Wine moves Geralt to Toussaint, a new region with its own arc, and it's built to be the final thing you do. Play it before finishing the Wild Hunt storyline and it will reference where Geralt's story lands — that's the spoiler risk, and there's no setting that turns it off.
It's also the more demanding of the two in raw numbers. Rather than quote a level, the useful rule is the one that follows from its design: if you haven't finished the main campaign, you aren't ready for it, and if you have, you almost certainly are.
The practical order
| When | What | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Around level 32 | Hearts of Stone | Self-contained, and it's the right challenge at that point |
| Main story | Finish the Wild Hunt | Blood and Wine is written after this, not around it |
| After the credits | Blood and Wine | It's the epilogue, and a new region to spend the endgame in |
One version note worth knowing if you're picking The Witcher 3 up on a new platform: both expansions are included in the Complete and Game of the Year editions, so there's nothing extra to buy — they're already sitting in your quest log waiting for the level.