Some more thoughts from midway through my first playthrough.
First off, this is the best game I've played all year, and probably the best game I've played since Red Dead Redemption. The Bloody Baron storyline enough would sell me on the game, but there's just so much of everything that it's really kind of intimidating. At times it does feel a bit ridiculous (yeah, I'm really interested in looking for my daughter, but first I'm going to stage a play and then go run down some rare cards for my gambling dwarf friend). But everything has heft. You make a choice in the moment, and it ends up leaving people dead... but it's not videogame-y enough to say "oh, that was the BAD choice," because everything you do has both positive and negative consequences. There is no right way to play, and that's awesome.
I do have complaints. I wish there was just a little bit more handholding. I like that you're encouraged to explore, but at times the game just utterly fails to point you in the direction that would make sense as far as progression goes. Case in point, I waited until I was level 4 to fight the griffin and leave White Orchard, because the game literally suggested I be that level. I did some missions in Velen and then thought, OK, let's explore a bit (now level 7 or so), and I'm wandering around the outskirts of Novigrad when I take a quest from a dwarf... and the suggested level is 2. I'm literally so over-leveled that the quest won't give me XP, but I had no idea it existed until I stumbled upon it. The game never said "hey, look for low-level quests over here!" and now I'm stuck with a quest in my log that there is zero reason to ever even attempt. Why put a level 2 quest in an area that wasn't even available before taking on a challenge the game told me to be level 4 for? That's stupid. I had another one that suggested I be level 11 to do it, but it concluded in Skellige, which the game recommended I was level 16 before visiting... why? If you're going to unlock sections of the game roughly based on level, don't put lower level quests behind those unlocks, yeah? That seems pretty basic.
And the encouragement of exploration leads to other weird things, where you end up discovering quest stages completely out of order. Oh, cool, looted a treasure, then 4 hours later stumble across a random letter that tells me where the treasure is... quest completed. What? Or bombs. Apparently one guy sells the diagrams to make every single bomb, but no one tells you where to find him. I'm 40 hours deep at this point and I just learned about this, not from finding the guy, but from Googling "seriously, how the hell do I get bomb diagrams in Witcher 3". There's nothing telling me "go talk to this dude." And that's all well and good, except the world is VAST. Random bomb guy could be in some random backalley in Novigrad, or on a lone outpost in Skellige, or in the middle of the swamp, or hundreds of other places in a map that's basically the size of Belgium; relying on players randomly finding this person is basically telling people "don't worry, you'll never need bombs."
Did you know crossbow bolts do like 20x normal damage underwater? I didn't. I kept trying to lure Drowners on shore to take them on because, seriously, the crossbow? That's just going to make them angry. Oh, when it's underwater, suddenly it's magical? Hey, here's a thought, why not a potion that makes the crossbow ALWAYS LIKE THAT? What logical reason is there for the crossbow being utterly useless on land and Godlike underwater other than "crap, this is the only method of attacking underwater, better make it stronger just here"? In a game that does such a good job avoiding game cliches, that feels pretty ridiculous.
At one point I was doing a quest and the only dialogue options were either "Play Gwent" or "kill that guy." I had less than zero interest in Gwent, so some poor villager died. What the hell? And there are some occasions where I guess I don't quite realize what the outcome of saying a particular line of dialogue will be, as it immediately leads to a fight. At one point, I had five quests in a row take a super-aggressive turn and slaughtered dozens and dozens of soldiers all because I was choosing dialogue options that apparently pissed people off. I'm not bothered by that, but I was trying to be a "good" guy, and I keep ending missions in a whirling maelstrom of white hot rage and death. That's not what I wanted, dammit! I mean, it kind of is... but not in a way that makes me look like a psychopath! Come on, man.
But those are such niggling things. This game is just stunning in every conceivable way. At one point, I went to a barber who was so hammered he gave me the wrong haircut. And I couldn't even be mad with the guy. I was just impressed that the designers bothered to include that detail. Sure, he's a barber, but he's pissed at life and drunk and doesn't care what his customers want. That's a completely extraneous detail that makes things feel real. Who hasn't been to a drunken barber and emerged with mutton chops? That's just life.