I'm not going to complain about the controls, the installer, the bugs or anything like that. Besides a few minor issues, I found The Witcher 3 to be a perfectly serviceable, relatively bug free experience. The game gets three stars for its phenomenal production values. The music, voice acting, facial animations, architecture, costume design and for the most part, the writing are all hugely impressive for a game of this size. There were moments I felt like I was playing a focused, "cinematic" game like The Last of Us, which is very impressive for an open world RPG with potentially hundreds of hours of play time. I can't justify giving this game a higher score however because the core gameplay is severely lacking. The combat "works" and is quite intuitive but it's neither realistic nor fantastic. What I mean by that is that it's very weightless and unsatisfying, but at the same time it's also very simplistic and doesn't leave a lot of room for creativity. As powerful as Geralt is, he's still just a man who fights with two handed swords and has a small arsenal of not-particularly impressive spells, and yet he still dances about and auto-aims like this is a game with flashy combos and interesting combat (which is doesn't have). The identity crisis here is jarring. The open world is a terrible case of quantity over quality. It doesn't feel deliberately designed nor worth exploring for any reason other than to find more heavily scripted quests. As for the quest design, if you end up buying or replaying the game, really carefully observe just what it is that you as the player are asked to do. Yes, the quests are wonderfully contextualized with great voice acting and writing, but outside of dialogue choices, do you really have much agency? Are you playing the game or is the game playing itself for you? Do you ever have to *think*? Visually and aurally, this is a beautiful game. In terms of gameplay, it needs to be more heavily critiqued.
