Love it. I tried to read all 45 pages, but skipped from page 9 to here. Sorry
The apologies being mainly for duplicate mentions of issues/praise:
pros:Gorgeous art workReally good storyAwesome fighting moves (as a student of kung fu and tai chi I can really appreciate the motion captured moves)Really nice approach to getting you involved in the fights, rather than click-fest or click-and-pray, but without getting too Virtua Fighter-style involved with it
hmm, room for improvement:Load times (although running raid1 on the disks with the saved games files doesn´t help here)Saving (I understand not wanting to overwrite save files and I like autosaves using a new slot, but why not cycle through 3 slots with quicksave, rather than save in a new slot every single time)Feeling of running into artificial barriers, especially when the environment suggests you´re in a wide, expansive areaEconomy (so in the whole world, there are what, 6 witchers left and only the odd "normal" person willing to take on monsters. Yet with monsters all over, your services are worth less than the cost of a book?)Sheathing/unsheathing (Do both or neither automatically. As it is, I can stand there getting beaten to death without making a move to grabbing a weapon, while on the other hand with the amulet still going crazy Geralt will calmly decide the fight´s over).Signi icons (I did not make notes on what icon is what sign. I will have to look them up on the internet now, because the glossary does not explain and I do not know other than fire and wind, which icon stands for what sign so I don´t know how to select any of them other than those two)Free choice (far from the only game with this downside, but as it is, your choices affect how people will react to you, but I don´t think this goes far enough. For replayability, it would be better if whole quest paths would be closed depending on who you piss off or befriend)npc models (again, not the only game with this problem at all. Must be harder than it sounds to implement an npc model-building branch: sex, race, choice of 5 basic head shapes, choice of 6 noses, choice of 10 styles of hair, choice of 4 chins, choice of 10 types of jewelery including nose (including moustach and beards for males), choice of 5 different clothes, choice of 10 colours, that´s 1.2M different npc´s there)
dislikesThe very catchy, lingering tune while playing poker (It´s been literally doing my head in, I wake up with the thing going on in my head and it´s really starting to piss me off to the point where I will start playing with the music off and hope that actually turns off the poker tune. Which is a shame, because the rest of the music score fits the game really well)