Opinion: The Witcher 3 is boring, confusing, bad written and bad directed, etc...

[HoloDust]

You should probably not fall for hype next time and, considering RPGs you listed, stick to American made WRPGs (not that anything is inherently wrong with them per se).

Witcher 3 is definitely not as good of an open-world WRPG as people tend to rate it, it fails in so many aspects, especially when it comes to overly horizontal world building and proper RPG skills, yet calling its story, characters and combat boring or otherwise is...well silly IMO. And FFS, will you people stop comparing DS combat with Witcher, both are quite functional and quite average.

Making good open-world action WRPG is probably the hardest thing dev can set upon to do - it used to be quite niche genre, that peaked with Gothic 1/2 and Morrowind and it makes it even harder when they try to cater to mainstream audience. Unfortunately, CDPR decided to make mainstream game, and since open-world games became mainstream, they went with it. Witcher 2 is fairly linear game, but is much more detailed and overall much better game...well at least IMO.

But this is the price to be paid - Skryim is utter garbage compared to Morrowind, but Bethesda knows what they need to do to sell tens of millions instead of few millions.

These days, true WRPGs are more or less dead - at least when it comes to AAA devs - some genres are simply too niche in their core to remain true to itself when they go mainstream and are better left alone being niche.

That said, there might come the time when some new developer, bold enough to make paradigm shift, or at least go back to roots, will show up and make something really worth the praise.