hi
This is more of a 3.5 rating but since GG doesn't allow that I'm more leaning towards 3. The game is a great concept but unfortunately it's far from perfection yet, even not really on the expected level, but then it had too much hype. Stuff to fix: - a big number of bugs: random teleportation glitches, weird animations, HUD issues. Luckily not gamebreaking bugs for now but more or less annoying and destroying the atmosphere nonetheless. - AI of both the town and the enemies. Despite beaautiful looks the town doesn't really feel like a town. You have cars getting stuck if you park in the middle of the road, random people having "speak to" option with no reaction, including shops that don't want to sell you food, groups of gangsters standing next to eachother and not noticing you trying to choke one of them from the back, etc. Enemies are slightly better but still acting very weird at times, e.g. shooting at nothing in close melee combat in hard mode. - side quests feel kind of boring, compared to e.g. Witcher 3. There you often had a nice story, lots of choices to make and some interesting contract enemies with plot twists. Here, from what I've experienced for now, most quests have really boring endings of messaging someone and getting some cash. And some of them have almost no background either, you just go to a place, clear it and feel lucky if you find something to read. Or there are some blue stars with I assume sudden events you need to react to, but you react to them and literally nothing happens. If some people were under attack they don't even bother to thank you for saving them. Like what's the point? - not enough romance options xD If all of those were fixed, I'd give it a 5. But for now I'll play through the game like it is to see how much it improves in the future.
The fighting system could be a little bit more challenging and less abusable at times, other than that it's one of the best games ever made.
The RPG elements (definitely the strongest side of CDPR) and most puzzles make me not regret the money, but card battles and related resource management on the hardest difficulty are a joke, you win most battles 2-0 with 300 points over your opponent. Resource management is boring in general, they could have came up with something better than gold/wood/recruits that you mostly pick. Overall my rating is more like 3.5, but I ceiled it to 4.
Not sure what I'm even rating because it surely isn't Gwent. It's basically a new game that combines mechanics of Gwent and MTG with HS's randomness. A hodgepodge that was supposed to make everyone happy, but that's unfortunately not how you satisfy customers in CCG industry. I prefer MTG mechanics in MTG, they won't replace unique Gwent aspects for me - such as fighting for CA and controlling rounds. The game was made much more casual-friendly probably as requested by CEOs and flagged as "Homecoming" to make old players keep the game busy in the meanwhile. However, veterans like me laughted at that, let's call it "clickbait" title, as soon as they started announcing features. It's not "homecoming", it's "stealing from other homes". I think casually the game is fine, competitively it's much worse and players like Lifecoach or Freddybabes have already commented why, so I'm sure one of the biggest advantages of Gwent - crowded, well-organized tournaments - will be gone quickly.
