I'm almost done the Witcher and it is a rather impressive game, from several viewpoints.
The combat system is impressively bad. There are breaks in combat flow every time you sheath/unsheath your weapon which happens at least twice per fight. You are basically stunned while doing so, and god forbid if you have something beating on you as you might as well go grab a cup of tea while watching Geralt struggle to pull out the right sword. Add to that the automatic unsheathing (can't be disabled) which is about as helpful as a faceful of piss and you'll find yourself avoiding combat as much as you can. If you're too incompetent to code a decent combat system, just take the standard button mashing Jade Empire/Kingdom Hearts route and save us the agony.
Game mechanics are impressively murky. For a game that takes itself seriously as an RPG, certain details just aren't here. There's a huge Glossary section but no mention of any status effects, what they do, or how long they last. Attack speed is never mentioned, and potion descriptions are vague. Combat text scrolls up too fast to see in action (not adjustable), attack range is obscure, enemy collision makes maneuvering difficult, strafing puts you at a snail's pace, rail system (engine limitation) doesn't belong in this game, stat stacking is ridiculous (you can get over 100% dodge), blah blah blah blah. Did they even test this game before releasing it? Five minutes in and I can already identify problems.
Speaking of problems, I had the game crash 3-4 times, and one more due to a cutscene placement. This is unacceptable. I can't even imagine the pile of trash people had to endure before patch 1.2. I'm on Vistax64 with 4gb of ram and there is no excuse whatsoever for any kind of crashing. I can't even remember the last time a modern game crashed on me.
The inventory is impressively horrid. 75% of your inventory will be filled with herbs, 25% with potions, and if you want to carry quest-kill items or loot you're out of luck. They should either have another bag for herbs only or expand the inventory some more. Good thing you'll never need to sell any loot for money because ...
The AI is impressively missing. The A showed up but the I isn't here. Enemies charge at you till they die. Once they have you surrounded they'll attack you one or two at a time, just like 80s kung-fu movies. Poker opponents at ALL levels play like they're blind, rolling randomly, losing every match without fail and obliterating any concept of monetary value. How hard is it to code a poker game that doesn't even use cards?
The game is impressively long. Because it loves to make you walk a lot. And backtrack. Who doesn't want to play an 80 hour game in 20 hours? Certainly not those fools who like condensed, tightly scripted games such as Call of Duty 4! Seriously, this isn't the 80s anymore when game releases were few and far between. Condense your game, we don't all have 100 hours to spend backtracking to pad your playtime count.
with all that said...
The voice acting is superb. This is one of the very few games I've seen where (some of) the actors deliver lines that don't feel like they're hamming it up in a studio.
The atmosphere is amazing. Even though the game scores negative points for making women so easy to score, at least it treats me like an adult and I appreciate that. The gore and feel is great, as if it's spitting in the face of other RPGs that sell out the atmosphere for a PG rating.
The cutscenes are good. They add a nice break in your endless backtracking and provide some humor to boot.
The choices are well-designed. I kept second-guessing myself after making them, telling myself I probably should have picked something else. I picked the bastard racists in red over the dirty racists in blue, and the powerful bitchy chick over the weak cute chick, and neither of them were easy decisions. Bravo.
Overall, this game puts me in a difficult position. On one hand I hate supporting incomplete, messy piles of code like this, but on the other hand I'd like to see more games similar to The Witcher in the future, except with a more thorough run through Quality Assurance. I can see why it's PC RPG of the year, only because winning that title is so meaningless due to lack of competition. It's a very good game, by far from Game of the Year.