I remain critical of the lack of any distance closing attacks. I saw a few in past vids, now it seems Geralt has to slash his way to reaching the target. It just doesn't look right. Why not have an animation where Geralt actually reaches the target, and then attacks?
I kind of agree with this, I notice sometimes the lack of a quick and straightforward attack that could be used to short distance and hit as fast as you get near the enemy.
Slashing your way to the enemy is bad of course, but its also mostly related to player skill, if you're not in sword range, dont swing. But at the same time, to do that, it seems players need to either dodge towards the far away enemy, or roll, which has a lot of problems naturally because you cannot attack immediately after those, and the distances of those moves might not "fit" just right enough, so you may roll one time and end up passing the enemy or recovering in front of him while he hits you.
The fast attack includes a big advance with the spin. And you can step towards your opponent and then attack. It seems alright. I think only previous Witcher and "free flow" combat games have a very long reach. For guys who got used to the Soul Series, I think the range on TW3 seems very natural. It's just more manual, whereas the stuff you seem to be used to was more automatic. You don't need to whiff your way in. Just step and strike.
The difference here is that TW3 is much faster than souls, and more lethal and unforgiving than Batman. Plus like I said above, it seems that to get fast towards and enemy and also hit as fast as possible, which with TW2 animations wasnt a problem at all (it was even fun), in TW3 you need to perform unreliable and inaccurate moves to cover distance that render you vulnerable right when you need to hit, which is at the end of the movement to get close to the enemy.
I think this is once again one of those things that can be "solved" if Geralt could seamlessly and quickly go into sprint running from his combat stance and hit with that momentum. I haven't seen proof of that yet, but I hope its there and that it works well.