Objectively speaking, it's at least "pretty good"

Yep, this game is shaping up to very possibly be the best computer game I've ever played--it's a masterpiece. I'm looking back on ~30 years of PC games, so that is really saying something...;) I've heard other people make the same comment, but up until recently in the game I didn't believe it--but the deeper you get into this game, beginning really in Velen (White Orchard is more of a tutorial area than anything else, imo), the better it gets! Incredible.

With all due respect, I have to object. When you aim for perfection - skies are limit. So, technically speaking, while this game is not perfect and have numerous flaws, those who notice and list them are star gazers.

Started out with my first PC (before that it had been the C64 and Amiga for some additional years) in 1991.

That again means:

- I am slightly outdated, numbering 69 years right now
- I know what had been on the table back then, thinking of those SSI games, thinking of Bards Tale, of the Ultima series and many, many others.

- But it also means that I have seen real story telling in those games.
Plots like masterpieces, no eye catching gimmicks that tried to make up for poor stories behind games.


So if you REALLY think of W3 (I love it dearly) as "the best computer game you've ever played", I want to suggest to maybe refresh your memory by playing one (or more) of the old ones again.
Conveniently GOG has some of them for cheap, so.....

In all honesty: take away the visuals from most of our actual games - not much of story left.

But visuals are part of the story, now more than ever before. W3 impressed me with that with all the sideways glances, smiles, sneers, and special camera views. Heck, pretty much half of Yen's characterization is missing if you don't account for her dirty looks.

Reading comics - versus plain books - seems to be much the same.
Please, do not get me wrong here:
when I first opened my first Ultima game there had been a black background, some lines for surroundings, and some icons for enemies. Good story though.
Now, I would not get so far as to call this anything to strike for in actual games - but W3 is only as good as it is because other graphix orientated games do have even greater flaws, bugs, and less of a story.

With our actual machines capable of things that one could only have dreamed of back then, it would be nice if somebody could see the need or opportunity to actually write something worth while.
No comic, a story.

Have you tried Shadowrun? Or Pillars of Eternity? Heavy writing there, you might like it.

I would compare W3 more to a movie, more than a comic book. Because, you know, the audio-visual pictures in motion and all.

Edit: Also, in the writing department, there is Torment: Tides of Numenara which is supposed to come out soon. And there was Wasteland 2 last year which is supposed to release a free director's cut in October with updated graphics/gameplay.

Agree that it is worthwhile & even enjoyable to discuss how the game could be further improved. Intent of post was to express disagreement with those saying things like "I'm never buying another game by cdpr again because of a minor imperfection in w3!" I personally think the story in w3, even stripped of its aesthetics in telling it, is at least "pretty good."

Thank you so much for making me feel young for a change.
I am just a whipper-snapper in comparison, with my 41 years :)
I started with Commodore Vic20 as the first computer I had. But I had an atari 2600 console before that. Those were the days, my friend (we thought they'd never end) :)

To OP; don't be a douche, please.
This is a good game, but it has many problems. Most are small, but I have to say that until patch 1.07 I couldn't even play the game, due to video driver crashes caused by the game. I know it was the game because I tried at least 5 different drivers, and ran it on 2 systems because I upgraded my PC for this game just after I bought it.
The story is disjointed, badly told and way too full of filler (the game even makes fun of itself for this at one point "so you have to find dudu to find dandilion to ultimately find ciri? That's a lot of finding people") to make it as long as it was.
And the bugs are far to numerous to list, with the horse being one of the worst, NPC spawning the most jarring when the horse DOES work.

I can understand that you would be upset about not getting the game to run. In such a circumstance it would make sense to request a refund. But are you really that upset about the other quibbles? Come on. The game has many imperfections but I honestly can't understand why you would get hung up on them if you've been playing games for more than a few years. Hopefully further bugs will be fixed and mechanics refined by mods if nothing else, but if anyone is "disappointed" with this game, I can only think they've never played a game before. Contrast with daggerfall for historical context.

@w0bbl3r I think this is a good summary of the game. I too think it is a good game, but a great game I am not sure for the above said reasons and others including it is just so bloated with filler quests. Personally the Novigrad quests to find Dandelion and then do all that ridiculous gathering of things for him has stopped me playing 3 full play throughs. I have gotten to that stage 3 times after 2 full play throughs and just can't make myself do those quests, especially when the Bloody Baron quests were so damn good.

FYI - 49 yo Go the old people ;-)

It seems we are in agreement that the game is good.

Purpose of thread was not to declare it a masterpiece but to express disdain at the behavior of many commenters mirroring spoiled children and acting like the game is a disaster whenever they encounter a bug. CDPR has shown sufficient goodwill in releasing the game without DRM, without microtransactions, & with substantial free post-release content and features that I feel they should be spared the temper tantrums over the minutia.

Honestly I suppose that it's the brattiest 1% of gamers making 10% of the noise, though. Everyone in this thread seems reasonable enough.

Not that I'm a disagreement, more like side-by-side opinion. Some of old games did not aged gracefully. Since you made book reference, imagine book printed on very poor quality paper, you know, greyish-yellow, very thin, with diluted ink, in difficult to read font that bloated a bit due to nature of paper. It may be good book, but it's very difficult to read. And since old gamed told stories through text, not visuals, that's the problem, we had to read a lot. Pillars of Eternity did great, Spiderweb's games did fine (depending on game engine, really, some better, some worse), Eschalon, Wasteland 2, and Inquisitor somewhere around. So some games' text/UI were not properly adjusted to modern resolutions (I don't mean 5 4K surround panels, so it's kinda difficult to read texts there. Not a "Vaseline over screen", more like "my gas masks leaks and tear gas got inside". :) Yes and no. True, many games have a story that is less interesting that text on latrine air refresher can. However, there is something else. Books have one form of narration, that's text. Pictures have second form of narration - image. If book has illustrations made under author's guidance, then it will have two forms of narration. Music has sound as narration, I guess we all heard a music play where no words were spoken or sang). Cinema pictures usually combine all three. But only games have fourth form of narration, that's gameplay. That's why I criticize Witcher 2/3 among other games, where gameplay not only does not support narration, but openly contradicts it, or breaks it. Yes, I mean early "no talent" Geralt for whom earlier levels present greater danger. Now we finally have hardware that could allow developers to not just tell us through text, voiceover, or show us through pre-rendered CGI clip how great someone is, they actually can let us play as that character to feel all that awesomeness. Yet, as it seems, most developers are interested in adding 2048x2048 textures and few more thousands of polygons on Triss' boobs, I don't care about that. I mean she's nice and all that, but, I see them like for a couple of minutes while I play Geralt for two freaking hundred of hours. It seems for me that most developers haven't even started to master narration through gameplay. Can't speak for everyone, but I'm tired from those "cutscene powers" we don't have access to in gameplay. Which is sad, by my opinion.
Ironically very few games do that fine, and those games are simulators, where not much of other forms of narration are present. Well, I'm quite disappointed with CDPR's handling of "downgrade-gate", "system requirements gate", and "budget gate", it doesn't have much to do with quality of Witcher 3 "as is", but it is related to overall impressions left by company. Yes, I do think things like these are important. Tolerating downgrade (for any reason) is bad practice, because it is encourages developers to play this trick all over again. Whacking them once or until they get that we don't care for bullshots, we want see game to grow, to evolve, to become better, not being chopped in parts because they couldn't fit it into console hardware or whatever may serve them (and through that - us) well - don't promise something you can't deliver, and if you can't, don't fucking wiggle, just commit it. Gamedev will never be taken seriously until they start acting responsibly. Overbloated system requirements is very similar case, giving a clear overshot is outright lie, intended to trick people into thinking that game is indeed that advanced, so it needs all that computing power, while in reality game barely uses them. Budget-gate is least of all sins, but still, quite interesting - if rumours 35M$ of development budget and 32M$ of marketing budgets will be correct, I wonder if slight rearrangement of budgets could greatly improve game, while only slightly weakening marketing. I mean, with these numbers, PC gamers alone could finance development easily, without all that "consoles have money" BS.
As for Witcher 3's flaws, I'm pretty sure they'll deliver good stories in those two upcoming DLCs, but honestly, I didn't like combat very much, as I find it to be unnecessarily overcomplicated, not engaging, exhaustive (not difficult), and dull. Judging by CDPR's behaviour, they make fix some UI issues game has, but combat will probably remain untouched. I don't know how much fighting new content will have, but those 200+ hours I spent playing core game basically killed all passion towards following gameplay. Before Witcher 3 I was strong supporter of idea that the story in games should be prevalent, but Witcher 3 showed that it is actually a gameplay that matters a lot, even if it was story that made me tolerate Witcher 3's flawed gameplay.Actually I think story and gameplay should support each other, not compete, but as we play games, gameplay should be important.
So, will I buy something from CDPR? Depends on what they going to make and how they going to handle that. Not sure I'll pre-order, though, I'd rather wait for demo version (or use Steam for easier refunds), and first reviews from people whose gameplay styles I know. Enhanced editions spoiled me, that's right. :D

This topic needs to be cast in bronze and used by everyone as a reply on a questions like "aren't you too old to play video games?" NO! /grin

I'm pretty sure CDP actually right away said that they lowered graphical fidelity somewhere after being confronted, didn't they? Anyway, above all, wanting game previews to show how final product will look like is unrealistic. The way software development works, doing the first preview is easy - you just throw whatever you want on a pile, make something playable out of it and then test it a bit so it doesn't explode in the middle of a presentation. Of course they're going to make everything look as pretty as possible - at that stage, they have no way of knowing how will that graphical fidelity influence all hardware configurations a few years down the line, and so they throw in all they want to have in the final product and then start cutting corners until they get a product with reasonable requirements (and yes, if Witcher 3 was not 'downgraded' for consoles, those outrageous system requirements you see would be even more outrageous)

So basically it comes to this - either don't do previews at all or take all previews with a grain of salt.

Eh, I think some criticism in the sea of love-goggled whitewashing of the game's flaws is healthy. I can't help but roll my eyes a little any time someone claims it's the best game they've ever played.

Not really. First thing they did was claim that the perceived downgrade was entirely due to Youtube compression, and they maintained that lie all the way up to launch. Priestly even went on the attack at one point on the official forums over it, because of course he did.