Just got a new update for the game.

I put in over 30 hours on this game from Friday to Sunday this past weekend. Absolutely love it. Playing it on the second highest difficulty. At times when I die it feels cheap and frustrating, but the story makes up for those hiccups for me.

I´m also playing on the second highest difficulty, now they REALLY need topatch those load times, especially the one that loads your save after you die, atrocious.

Quit the game and reload your save. Ihad a bug for on eof my quest and doing taht solved it

It wasn't so bad in White Orchard, but now I'm in Velen it's way too long. I'm playing on easy, I'll get my fun from speed and not getting hit at all. Long reloads on death will ruin a game for me.

8/10 so far

Play it on normal. its not  that hard on normal .  Its fair on normal

Your MAIN final ending really matters on the decisions you make after Kaer Morrhen or whatever is unlocked, that's all I have to say. Besides that, every little decision you make for characters or whatnot will have a short cutscene throughout the game later on telling you what your action spawned.

I've seen the 3 main endings, but boy am I glad I got the ending I wanted. Choose wisely!

fair enough. it will take you 25 hours if you speed run it :). its a highly addictive game

Haha I will never make it in 25 hours. Speedy battles I meant. It seems "just the story" difficulty is a bit of a lie. It only adjusts the level range a bit. You still need to level up and do things in order at the appropriate level. I make it hard on myself regardless of the difficulty :)

I was wandering around Velen, still lvl 4, saw a bandit camp with lvl 10's in it, thought to give it a try. Died on the first attemp. You hardly damage them and they hit for 40% to 60% of your health per hit (which I have boosted with the +500 vitality). I was not doing bad actually, yet the camera got stuck in a tree, they got 2 hits in and dead. Second attempt I quickly took out the archers and stayed away from trees, doable yet lengthy fight, no reward though.

Somehow that made me think I could do the lvl 10 contract, fight a noonwraith. I was hitting it, 150 fast to 220 damage with strong attack, magic trap worked fine. This went on from midnight to 2:30 am in game time. No health bar on her so no clue how far down she was. Meanwhile the ground got littered with the corpses of the extras she spawns. She still managed to get a hit in now and then so I ran out of food (takes a lot to recover from 1 hit since I had run out of swallow long ago). The game ever so helpful decided to get me drunk lol.
I backed off a bit to meditate to get swallow back, yet no clue if the noonwraith recovers as well then? Anyway not seeing any progress I gave up after half an hour, looted all the corpses (about 20 noonwraith mutagens) and went to do the witch quest.

Ofcourse during wandering the dark my sword went red, must have worn it down with the noonwraith. I was also still out of food. At some point you have to defend keira metz while staying in a circle. Not that easy with the clunky controls and automatic forwad movement while fighting. Health goes down very fast outside the circle, are you insta dead on hard difficulty? Letting them in a little closer to stay in the center had Keira's health bar go down to 40% in 2 seconds... In the last circle I suddenly couldn't use my sword anymore, only punch and signs, which soon became drunk punching as that was the only vitality regen stuff I had. Clusterfuck, yet funny too. Somehow I made it through, both of us with hardly any health left.

I did go from lvl 4 to lvl 6 on that one story quest. Maybe I can dispatch that noonwraith now lol.
(I did leave the camp full of lvl 13 wraiths alone at the end of wandering the dark, I'm learning)