What makes The Witcher 3 so utterly brilliant?

[HoloDust]

To answer the poll question, I consider TW3 to be THE showcase that stands on the very edge between action-RPG and action-adventure, and benchmark for all pseudo-RPGs (or RPG-lites, or whatever, like AC Odyssey, Horizon and similar games) to be measured against.

To tie into the answer about brilliance - as someone who gave it 8/10 back then, with caveat that its various aspects go from 6.5 to 9.5, it's mostly its RPG aspects that gravitate toward 6.5. Hopefully, TW4 fixes that.

Proper Action-RPGs never really got to the same place of quality of RP part as CRPGs have (and no, I'm not talking about BG3) - while there are some that were standouts and gave a glimpse of potential bright future, I find that, in time, action part of the genre got too dominant over RPG part, thus diluting intended experience.