Gone to a general store and found a copy for myself =]

I have been taking a lot of prints, first game doing so much, prettiest I have seem.

I did found the fire in the island escape on TLOU2 to be the best I've ever seen.

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 I don't know why game designers still stick to the outdated method of putting handholds on cliffsides for you to specifically use.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.

Anyone else forget this isn't GTA and accidentally slash your horse?

Also didn't realize til recently that the touchpad has multiple functions based on swipe direction. My life is complete now that I can bow respectfully and stylishly sheath my sword to my heart's content.

The horse calling isn't quite on the level of Dynasty Warriors, and they work with lower budgets. For that game you can call the horse and instantly mount it in one motion if you desire, for GoT I still have to press R2 after pressing left.

Not yet. I do like that when I jump off a massive cliff, the horse doesn't instantly die like in RDR2. It is not realistic, but it is more fun.

This is the most enjoyable open world game I've played since Witcher 3 (and Xenoblade Chronicles X before it).

In open world games I like exploring. I don't care much about story even though I welcome a better one. The world in this game is spectacular. The golden birds are also great, they always take you to some significant place and it's a mechanic that I've never seen before. Plus you have the quests that are added to the map and I've never seen that before either. It's much more fun than having the usual quest page with a huge list of quests that you have to select to find the destination. The map is always full of destinations to find out and that's incredibly fun.

This game also has the merchants that turn golden on the map when you have enough resources to buy something from them. I've never seen this before. It's great.

Loading times are insane. You can die without fear of being punished by 30s of loading. Fast travel is truly fast. It's almost instantaneous.

The combat is always fun no matter the flaws you find and I got used to the camera really quickly.

So, for those of you who've played it, is this game actually good? Like, is the combat system good, is the stealth good, is the exploration actually worth while? Or is it just another twist on the rather generic AAA open world formula? I have a feeling combat is pretty ok going off reviews and previews, but I'm sort of worried about the stealth and open world part.

Don't forget the fox and the wind.

The combat is great and challenging, you do have to parry, block and dodge to survive, you have 4 stances that you can choose that are better depending on the oponent. You also have 1x1 duels where the mechanics change again.

I avoid doing stealth, but as pointed it is quite easy, but I think it isn't as easy as AC.