I thought I'd take a moment to compare this to other openworld games I've played.
Combat is significantly above that of the Witcher 3, both in complexity and in quality. You have dodge, perfect dodge, parry, and perfect parry. Enemies keep you on your toes with varied attacks, and aren't pushovers. Bowmen will shoot at you from behind their melee counterparts. You can do horse archery to a decent extent. Armors are varied enough to offer different combat playstyles, like God of War. Witcher 3's combat is just slow and bland compared to this game.
Like I've said many times before, stealth is really awful. I mean, I don't expect high quality stealth in an open world game, but this is still pretty bad, even by open world standards. BotW, and Horizon both had stealth at least on the level of Sekiro. I'm not expecting Splinter Cell or Thief levels of stealth gameplay here, but c'mon. Enemies really shouldn't take 3-5 seconds to go from suspicious to "THERE HE IS! GET HIM!", when you're not even crouching or trying to hide.
Exploration and mobility is fantastic in most cases, but I find myself missing the ability to outright climb anything like I could do in BotW. I don't know why game designers still stick to the outdated method of putting handholds on cliffsides for you to specifically use. The ability to call your horse at anytime from anywhere is great. Even in Witcher 3 calling your horse was a pain. Roach would often get stuck or confused, and refuse to come to you. In BotW I think your horse had to be a specific distance close to you, or you couldn't call it. Lame. GoT just does the horse calling mechanic better than any other open world game I've played. I know this is just a small QoL improvement here, but a little bit goes a long way. There's a ton of small exploration QoL add ons in this game that I love. Burnt villages issue smoke from afar. Hot Springs have steam rising up from far off, as well as the telltale Maple tree that you can spot from a distance. Birds lead you to points of interest. The wind shows you where your next objective is. You could just turn off the entire HUD and find your way around in this game pretty easily. That. Is. Good. Game. Design!
I can't judge the story yet, since I haven't finished it, but I've really enjoyed the missions I've gone on so far. The writing on these missions is short, to the point, and interesting. Witcher 3 (and Metro Exodus) has these ultra long winded, paragraph long, exposition conversations that just overstay their welcome. On the flipside, Link barely talks to anyone, or more like he listens. Aloy has some good conversations, but for some reason, I didn't find hers as interesting as the ones in GoT.
