What isn't clicking for you? The combat? The quests?
I honestly don't know. It started when I saw a billion points of interest in the second area, but then I just decided to stop going after every single one of them, and my enjoyment hasn't really improved at all.
I decided to drop it from Death March to Easy to see if spamming a button just to get to the story segments would make me like it more, loaded my previous Death March save 10 minutes later, it was awful on lower difficulties, the combat is actually fun.
If I absolutely had to put my finger on the reason, perhaps doing many side quests for different people, and then when I finally decide to go back to the main quest, it's the same shit as any other sidequest, people asking me to do shit for them and telling me their whole life before I can get 5 minutes of relevant main quest info.
Even playing as Ciri, which I was very excited about, turned out to be awful imo, her gameplay is shallow as hell, it was absolutely boring, and the game didn't give a shit about my decisions.
Little girl: "Want to know why I'm here?"
Me: "No, shut up"
Moments later Ciri starts talking about it with her, as if I did ask her what happened. I DIDN'T KNOW AND I DIDN'T CARE, GAME PLS.
So if I understand it right, you enjoyed playing it when you were in White Orchid, but you couldn't enjoy it when the open world part starts in Velen?
If so, then just do some main quest and side quest if you can. Don't force yourself to explore everything if you don't want to.
Yeah, I guess I should follow your advice. I'm currently going through the Baron's quest. People seem really fond of it, so we'll see.
So far my favorite is the side quest
with the werewolf that killed his wife.