CS2 Skins for The Witcher 3: Building a Witcher Loadout Before the Wild Hunt Remaster
CD Projekt RED drops the remaster of The Witcher 3 on 29 September, and it lands free for anyone who already owns the game. The work goes deeper than a fresh coat of paint: alongside the textures and lighting, the studio has reworked combat, character progression and monster behaviour. Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine have already been handed to every owner of the base game, and the teaser that followed showed off a third expansion, Songs of the Past, set in a new region called Letten and due in 2027.
Dank, rain-soaked Velen. Drowners howling out over the bog. The frozen shorelines of Skellige, the fires of Kaer Morhen, and sorceresses who cause more trouble than the monsters do. Anyone who has put a hundred hours into the Northern Realms knows that feeling by heart.
You don’t have to wait until the end of September to get back into it, either. CS2 turns out to hold a surprising amount of witcher aesthetic: school medallions, a silver sword, creatures pulled straight from your first contracts. We’ve put together a loadout that looks like it was laid out on a bench in the Kaer Morhen armoury. Here’s the lot.
- Factory new – $3.49
- Minimal wear – $1.16
- Field-tested – $0.55
- Well-worn – $0.63
- Battle Scarred – $0.57
There’s only one place to start a witcher loadout, and that’s the School of the Wolf. White fur, ragged fanged edges running across the receiver, a cold grey-steel base underneath. This is a weapon you could picture hanging on a wall in Kaer Morhen while Vesemir runs the youngsters through the obstacle course in the dead of winter.
It also lands squarely on Geralt’s own nickname. The elves call him the White Wolf, and it’s the wolf medallion that trembles against his chest when there’s something monstrous nearby. The price is a bonus in itself: half a dollar buys you the centrepiece of the entire collection. Witchers are rarely wealthy men, so a budget opener feels about right.
- Factory new – $8.36
- Minimal wear – $0.82
- Field-tested – $0.60
- Well-worn – $0.36
- Battle Scarred – $0.30
Red and yellow scales, a diamond pattern down the slide, the sort of poisonous colouring that means exactly one thing in nature: leave it alone. The School of the Viper, distilled.
Its representative in the games is Letho of Gulet, the hulking kingslayer Geralt dealt with back in the second game, and who can turn up alive in the Wild Hunt if you let him walk all those years ago. The Viper gear in the third game comes from a quest of its own, and it’s worn by players who prefer to strike first. The Tec-9 has the same temperament: fast, brazen, built for arm’s-length work.
- Factory new – $5.09
- Minimal wear – $1.90
- Field-tested – $0.86
- Well-worn – $0.74
- Battle Scarred – $0.62
A snarling yellow cat’s face takes up the whole body, one eye swapped out for a red target, the background broken into teal and grey stripes. Twitchy, vicious, slightly unhinged.
The School of the Cat is the darkest of the witcher schools. Its graduates were pushed further through the mutations than anyone else, and half of them ended up as hired swords while the other half simply lost their minds. In the Wild Hunt you run into Gaetan, who put an entire village to the sword, and the conversation ends either in a fight or in the uncomfortable realisation that the villagers had it coming.
The MAC-10 suits that reputation to the letter. A fast weapon that empties a magazine in a couple of seconds, with no pretence of honour about it.
- Factory new – $131.53
- Minimal wear – $152.01
No artwork, no lettering. Bare metal, honest steel, an even shine across the slide. In the entire history of CS2, this is the most direct way to put a silver sword in your inventory.
Geralt lays out the rule within the first half hour: steel for humans, silver for monsters. Half of a witcher’s working life runs on picking the right blade at the right moment, then remembering to coat it in the correct oil for whatever you’re about to meet.
The pricing does something odd here: Minimal wear costs more than Factory New. Usually that points to a market with barely any copies on it, where the price is held up by the absence of supply rather than by demand. For a loadout it’s a nice detail. A silver sword ought to be scarce.
- Factory new – $533.11
- Minimal wear – $380.00
- Field-tested – $258.86
- Well-worn – $331.21
- Battle Scarred – $269.17
Ginger, fiery, gold flourishes down the slide and a red pattern that shifts from copper to scarlet as it catches the light. Triss Merigold as a handgun.
The match goes beyond hair colour. Triss is a fire sorceress in every sense: she pulls Novigrad out from under the witch hunters, smuggles mages out through a portal in a burning house, and generally turns up at the centre of any scene involving flames. Igni, meanwhile, is the first sign every player learns.
- Factory new – $300.00
- Minimal wear – $73.76
- Field-tested – $48.26
- Well-worn – $41.10
- Battle Scarred – $42.01
Violet and magenta throughout, a woman’s face on the slide, a cold stare, blue flourishes curling down towards the grip. Yennefer of Vengerberg, no argument.
Purple is her colour in the most literal sense: black and white in her clothes, violet eyes, lilac and gooseberries in the scent Geralt can pick out of any room. The noir treatment fits her character too. Yen shows up in the story when it suits her, uses whoever happens to be standing nearby, and almost never explains herself.
The Glock is the pistol that stays with you all match regardless of what’s in the bank. Yennefer stays with Geralt in much the same way, for the whole of his life.
- Factory new – $341.83
- Minimal wear – $30.93
- Field-tested – $12.00
- Well-worn – $9.33
- Battle Scarred – $9.31
Glacial blue across the body, a glowing creature buried in the artwork, frost creeping over the suppressor and handguard. Skellige entire, from the longships in the bay to the ice fields of Undvik.
The archipelago runs on contrast: warm feasts in Kaer Trolde and a frozen island next door where an ice giant flattened a whole settlement and the survivors are still holed up in caves. Add sirens circling overhead, a hym in the cellar and the general sense that darkness falls around three in the afternoon. Nightmare captures that with nothing extra in the frame: a cold palette, a glowing something and silence around it.
- Factory new – $729.46
- Minimal wear – $215.91
- Field-tested – $103.50
- Well-worn – $62.79
- Battle Scarred – $56.05
An acid-green wash, biological filth running down the body, glowing patches across the stock. Crookback Bog, if somebody decided to release it as a sniper rifle.
The swamps are the most unpleasant place in The Witcher 3. Drowners come out of the water in threes, water hags hang over the mire, foglets walk you in circles while you lose the path, and at the heart of it sit the Crones of Crookback Bog, politely offering you a deal.
- Factory new – $154.49
- Minimal wear – $12.35
- Field-tested – $4.54
- Well-worn – $6.52
- Battle Scarred – $4.08
A carved griffin on the magazine, woodgrain across the body, copper feathers and a background left completely untouched. It looks like a trophy sign lifted off a tavern in White Orchard.
The griffin is the first proper contract in the game and, in practice, the tutorial for the whole of the Wild Hunt. It’s where you work out what oil on a blade is for, why you want a crossbow against something airborne, and why witcher senses belong before the fight rather than after it. The head ends up mounted on a wall, and you walk away with your first real money and access to everything else.
- Factory new – $902.07
- Minimal wear – $330.00
- Field-tested – $186.24
- Well-worn – $111.56
- Battle Scarred – $98.36
A fresh arrival from the Arabesque collection and the most expensive item in the loadout. A blazing red body with gold flames licking across it, a blue djinn stretched along the receiver, small ornamental detail scattered over the magazine and handguard.
The djinn is the central thread of everything between Geralt and Yennefer. Three wishes, the seal found in a lake, the third wish that bound their fates together for good, and years of accusations back and forth about whether anything between them was ever real. In the Wild Hunt the pair go back to it in person: to find out whether they love each other without the magic, they have to summon the djinn again and break the wish.
The skin is built on exactly the same warning. Be careful what you ask for. The artist was working from Arabic mythology, but in a witcher context it reads identically.
Alex
Alex is an author and esports observer with more than seven years of experience. He specializes in analyzing new releases in the world of computer games, gaming services, and in-game economies. Alex shares practical experience and an expert perspective on the development of gaming, helping readers understand complex mechanics and stay up to date with the latest news.
