After finishing Witcher 3 here are my final thoughts and how a great game is nearly ruined by so many little bad design decisions. I know many people wont agree with me, but this is how I feel. I played the game on the second easiest difficulty.
First I will address what is the single worst aspect of the game for me personally:
1. The Combat. The combat is best described as a mix between assassins creed and the arkham series, with a little bit of the souls series thrown in. Except that it does nothing as well as those games and is a complete and utter disaster. In wide open spaces and one on one, its serviceable and for the most part I can manage, because you can often create enough room between you and your enemies to manage the fight.
However, it completely falls apart when you are fighting multiple enemies in small tight spaces. The situations dont happen a lot, but when you are in dungeons, or taverns/houses. It sucks. In those tight spaces, the camera will often put you in an awkward position where you can't see the enemies and I often found myself getting attacked from an enemy I couldnt see, which will often lead to multiple enemies getting good shots. And you end up having to frantically roll around to try to reposition yourself so you can get a good angle AND get enough space to use one of your sign powers just to create a tiny bit of breathing room. I dont even know why the dodge mechanic even exists in this game since it rarely created enough distance to avoid enemy attacks. I also hate that Geralt is forced to commit to every animation and you cant seem to cancel out of it. I have very slow reflexes and really struggle with parrying, although I was able to use it in one on one fights. I also hated how slow Geralt moved during combat. He should have moved quickly towards his enemies. The targeting system was off when dealing with a bunch of enemies.
Despite all of that, I eventually figured out that the best way to deal with multiple enemies when the game forces you into tight spaces was to make sure you started every fight with blocking engaged so that you could readjust the camera to a more favorable position. Doing that gave me a chance. Nevertheless, CDPR could take some tips from Rocksteady on how to design a nearly flawless combat system. Id say do away completely with the strong attack option and make signs work the same way gadgets do using the Arkham control set.
I hate that you cant force your way out of combat mode, in one instance I was on a boat and forced into combat mode, which meant I couldnt jump off and was forced to arrow shot my enemies to kill them. Other frustrating things include Geralt getting attacked while taking his sweet time getting off the horse. Im sure the response will be git gud and while it did become more manageable, it was never something that I didnt hate. I also got the platinum trophy on Bloodborne, all the arkham games and Assassins Creed games, thus I do feel that I have some skill as a gamer.
The combat was the big issue and the following issues are little things that quickly added up to create a death by a 1000 cuts scenario and really affected my enjoyment on what could have been one of the greatest games of all time.
2. Geralts movement. Its hard to describe, but I found it clunky. I find that if you are walking slowly and try to change directions Geralt would quickly dart in another direction. It was also a bad move to make the interact button the same button that makes Geralt run. If youre walking on high up area and you try to interact with something only to drop from a high ledge. This brings me my next criticism.
3. Why the hell do you take so much damage when falling off a ledge? Why does falling 10 feat take away three quarters or my health? That's ridiculous. While most games allow you to fall from ridiculous heights with little to no health penalty, but in this game its frustrating at parts where you have to drop down several ledges and given its very easy for geralt to walk too far you can end up taking fall damage from falling the shortest of distances. This is a game. Dont make it be realistic. Bloodborne had fall damage perfect. The amount of damage Geralt should take from falling should have been 25% at most.
4. Map icons not always being present. This one annoyed the piss out of me at times. In a normal open world game if I need to see a specific NPC there is a map icon that will let me know at all times where that NPC is located. In Witcher 3 those icons would appear and disappear seemingly at random. I need to go and see a Blacksmith, why is there no Blacksmith icon showing up?
For the most part I now know where specific vendors are when I need
something, but why not just make them ALWAYS appear? It makes no sense and can be very annoying when you're in a new area or in a city that is difficult to get around if you are looking for a specific vendor. This made playing games with new NPCs a chore AND if I needed an item I often couldnt find one. Seriously, how the crap did CDPR think this was a good idea? Trying to hunt down vendors added so much extra length to my playthrough, especially in the early hours.
5. Inventory management can be a nightmare. Where do I start?! For starters, there should have been a way to sort items, to my knowledge there was no method. For example, I'd like to know what items are heaviest, etc. Secondly, equipping items like bombs should have been easier instead of having to search through the slowest menu in existence. Crafting could be a pain in the ass, if you craft multiple things and you end up short on something you have to go back through the crafting menu and/or buy from the vendor which involved backing an out of the menu. One way they could have made it simple would be that if you highlighted the item that you were short of, it could ask you automatically if you wanted to purchase, craft or dismantle the necessary components to get it. People can argue that the this is part of RPGs, but it created unnecessary and unneeded frustration. Crafting was perfect in games like Farcry 4, Assassins Creed IV. Follow that model. On top of the slowest menu in existence. Towards the end of the game going back and forth between menus took sooooo long.
6. The load times between dying. On Xbox One they were an abomination. No idea if they are bad or worse on PS4. I used an external USB HDD.
7. The interact prompt seems to not work at times. I am not going to give examples, but far too often the interact icon would just not be present. This could affect some quests even.
8. Occasionally the crossbow would unselect between combat sessions. I almost always keep my crossbow as my go to item, but quite a few times I would have reenter the menu to inexplicably reselect it.
9. This was really only an issue when dealing with a pack of wolves, but let me run past the enemies without forcing me into combat mode. Most of the time I could manage, but in combat mode you slow down and Geralt has annoying tendency to turn around and when you just want to ignore wolfs it can be annoying.
10. Adopt the Fallout/Skyrim system of fast travel. Once you unlock a fast travel point just let us use it.
11. This is a complaint that is can be seen either way, but I found it annoying to realize that much later in the game that a decision made earlier locked me out of something else and that it would lead to failed quests later in the game.
12. Make all Gwent cards unmissable.
The good news is that I believe many of these issues could be fixed in DLC and/or patches.
In conclusion I feel that this game is really a 7/10 disguised as a 10/10 game.
It has excellent story, characters and some really well done quests and side pieces. The quests involving the Baron were some of the best written and most emotionally satisfying in any medium, let alone gaming, but the all of the little things really dampened the experience in places.
. I feel that way about everybody taking a more disappointing stance though, because clearly many of the issues that hampered yours (and their) enjoyment simply did not crop up for me.