The story begins brilliantly, but tragically undermines itself. The characters are quite well fleshed out, perhaps with even more detail and dialogue than those in the base game, and the initial fights are an engaging step up from the end of vanilla. I was initially very impressed, and this continued through most of the expansion. The added world content like treasure hunts, bandit camps, and other side activities were welcome additions. Unfortunately, the nature of the dangerous antagonist is too obvious, and the ending entirely unsatisfying and the choice completely binary. Denying one utterly evil character a victory should not mean that Geralt decides to completely ignore the faults of another very evil man, especially when he has the opportunity to confront him about everything he is responsible for at the end. Moreover, this character was so fundamentally annoying that the prospect of killing him was the my main motivator for getting to the end. Hearts of Stone is certainly the right name for the expansion. Other than Shani, and one very minor bit-part, there isn't a single character introduced that doesn't either deserve some kind of comeuppance, or somehow becomes incredibly annoying to the point that any sympathy I had is lost. Even the somewhat likable criminal characters you meet as part of a heist are still criminals, though they are at least somewhat less unlikable than almost everyone else. Even the victimised wife that we meet and whose past we painstakingly reconstruct, seeing in detail how she became estranged from her husband and more or less stopped caring about him, suddenly asks whether her husband has been saying anything about her, like the stereotype of a shy teenage romantic off a bad TV show. The later boss fights/ encounters are tedious in the extreme, and don't translate well at all into Witcher 3 gameplay, being more at home in an MMO. It's a terrible shame. I was completely sold on the brilliance of this expansion, until nearing the very end, Credit to CDPR for an amazing game, and a well-crafted, meaty expansion worthy of being sold as such – unlike DLCs in many other titles, you’re certainly paying for real content. Sadly, the annoyance-overload the characters subjected me too, the excessively restricted choice of endings, and some of the boss fights really undermined the experience and ruined my enjoyment of the material.
