What makes The Witcher 3 so utterly brilliant?

[HoloDust]

AddRat said:

The very high amount polish in dialogue, tone, atmosphere and beautiful areas with a generally functional-to-decent combat system and RPG elements that are not solely small % buffs on attacks.

Basically, at that scale, it's a choice between well written stories with beautiful visuals and an interesting interaction with the game mechanics. Rarely both. Witcher 3 IMO does the first exceptionally well and the second decently, putting it above most games of its kind.

Also, Gwent.

I do generally think that people gloss over the combat not being something particularly good, mainly because most WRPGs with action combat systems suck at that.

Yeah, I have no problem at all with its combat - combat is usually something that has always been playing second fiddle in this type of RPGs and it's more than adequate in TW3. Admittedly, a lot, if not majority of people who played TW3 were not standard action-RPG fans and came from more action oriented titles, so I understand why their expectations were different (as someone who loath most of Japanese approaches to melee combat, Souls being notable exception, I can understand peoples sensitivities about combat).