I wanted to love the **** out of this game, make it my life, even join the modding community and become a sort of power user for this game. Gamestop's initial review of this game (a glowing 7 out of 10) was correct. This game really is superficial set dressing around a short, linear storyline. It is mediocre as an action game. But as an open world game, it absolutely fails. Everything's cut and paste, procedurally generated set dressing. NPCs have boring one-liners (far less interesting than the one-liners from NPCs in The Witcher 3). Essentially, procedurally generated traffic, cops, NPCs, gang shootouts, and cars pop in within a hundred foot radius, and very uninteresting AI. At max LOD settings, things still pop in in a jarring way. Once you turn the LOD settings down (or watch PS4/Xbox One gameplay) you'll realise just how superficial the non-main-storyline content in this game actually is. You're not encouraged to explore the game, think outside of the box, play around with things, express yourself within the open world. There's minor bugs that can be fixed, sure, but there's issues so fundamental to the gameplay design, that it seems intractible to fix this game now that it's been released. Shouldn't have pre-ordered this game. Shouldn't have bought into the hype. Shouldn't have ordered in GOG to show my support for this team or get the soundtrack and artbook and exclusive in-game nonsense. All I can do now is hope that they'll pull a No Man's Sky and fix their game. But it seems like some of the issues are so fundamental to the game, it's going to be years of being held hostage to the possibility that I might get my money's worth eventually. "What did we learn Palmer....? I guess we learned not to do it again."
Bought at full price with DLC's; it's worth that much and more. Witcher 3 is rich with content, but treats it differently than most RPGs. You're not some slave to the NPC's of the world, nor forced to complete their fetch quests. The game has you making realistic decisions, and also makes you face the consequences of them later on. One caveat is that this game is hard to get into if you haven't played the first two games. It's a sort of tragedy with long game franchises like this, especially since the first game has very dated graphics and fighting mechanics that are sometimes annoying (the second game improves this, but is also very short). I would also only recommend playing this game if you have a decent computer. All three games are rich with story, and this game is no exception. Especially with the DLC's, you'll be playing the game for hundreds of hours before you run out of things to do—and, for the most part, the game lets you choose which affairs you get involved in, and which ones you don't. There is a large amount of customization in combat, but it seems to suffer from feature creep. Weapons and armor deprecate quickly, and there are level requirements for using certain items (which I found really annoying). Crafting and alchemy are also a mess in this regard, since you'll end up with more items than you'll ever need, and it's just better to sell every ingredient or crafting component you come across. Also, the game places a little bit of artificial linearity by making higher-level monsters impossible to kill without spending half an hour in a fight against it. I'm not really a fan of the leveling feature added to this game. The merits of this game mostly lie in the story and roleplaying elements. This game is definitely a unique experience. If you enjoyed the first two games, I would definitely get this game.
