Beat the The Witcher 3 (DLCs up next).
Really good game but I wouldn't agree that it's one of the very best of last gen.
Visuals and performance:
Visually the game holds up very well in most regards thanks to being heavily altered for current gen machines. Even then, character models are a bit lacking in detail. For example, King Radovid's bold head looks pretty blocky on closer inspection. Also, hair in general seems to be a bit of a problem. Constant clipping issues aside, they look like they could be from a late 7th gen game. There have been lots of advancements with hair in recent times so it's just one thing I keep noticing.
Performance was decent in the built I played (4.02 and then 4.03). I know it's not a perfect 60 FPS but I barely noticed the dips.
Bugs:
Alas, even though the game is almost 10 years old, it's still riddled with smaller bug such as the tons of clipping issues. For example a boat clipping into the jetty, water clipping through the boat making Geralt swim in the air, people's feet clipping into the ground - once I caught someone who was fleeing the scene, caught him and he fell towards the ground. Actually his whole body clipped through the ground - during the cutscene. Only his hands were visible.
I had a repeating audio bug in Skellige where I got loud interference noises out of nowhere.
I also found a completely empty room in the sewers below Novigrad which is located under the river. When I stepped into the room, Geralt began swimming in the air because the game thought that area was part of the river.
Obviously none of them were game breaking, but after all this time, you'd expect that someone would've noticed these and fixed them.
Story:
One of the high points of the game but there's so much stuff you won't understand since the fewest of people have played both predecessors. I played the Witcher 2 at least and thus knew some of the returning characters but the game expects you to know everything and worst of all. Quite a few things never happened in any of the games, only in the books!
The pacing is also a little off. I spent around 30 hours in Act 1 without even doing too many side quests. But once you advance to Act 2 the story accelerates insanely quick. It took me only around 15 hours to beat Act 2 and Act 3, so Act 1 took me twice as long as Act 2 and 3 combined.
The reason why Act 1 takes so long probably is that you have to constantly look for people. The main quest is to search for Ciri. To do that you need to search for people who saw Ciri (for example Dandelion). But since nobody has seen that person in a while, you also need to search them first. It's a searchception.
Gameplay:
Very good for the most part. Even when I never saw the point in doing all the potion, bomb and oil stuff. Got through the game just fine. Crossbow is also pretty useless. There is lots of loot which is always good. Abilities suck for the most part though. A handful of them is useful but the rest is just meh. I think I still have 15 unspent ability points but since the slots are limited, I don't see the point in unlocking more abilities. Can't use them anyway or I'd need to switch them out every couple of minutes.
Other annoyances:
Everything with horses. Horse racing is a completely dull experience. No skill involved and you can just block your opponents. Horses get stuck everywhere and can't jump down or up the tiniest of bumps.
I would need to check again but I think even RDR1 does a way better job here.
The navigation blips on the mini map suck. They might lead you to the back of a house instead of the front door. They will often change mid-route (especially on horse back). They don't work on custom markers.
Conclusion:
The Witcher 3 is a game with a strong story, strong gameplay and loads of content. Far from perfect though, as there are multiple smaller problems that can't be overlooked and thus impair the experience. 9.0/10
