They removed the wall-climbing during development and they were completely honest and open about it. I don't think those features were fake. I assume (and yes this is personal assumption) that they weren't fully tested across the board and ended up not working very well in the game for the most part, thus ending getting removed.I get the feeling that they were back to their old practices of just painstakingly handcrafting those corridor sequences so they look great instead of building a functioning open world game system that actually functions. This is not the first CDPR has done something like this. They have a tendency of making demos that have little to do with the actual game, just so they could sell the product. Anyone remember the wall-climbing and riding of the 48-minute demo? Guess why we can't do that? Because they faked the demo to appear like they were actually playing.
Similarly we can only drink beverages in the cutscenes in 1st person , because those are animated by hand instead of using the game engine. Cant in open world cause no such system exists.
The gap between those uninteractable sequences and the open world part is massive.
ps. Im not going to say crafting a good AI is easy, but when you have 7+ years and 20-50 million budget, there are very few excuses allowed. Other game companies give the impression of doing better stuff in half the time.
Also I see several people around keep pushing that false narrative that they had 7+ years of development, which is false. Can we already stop with that, please? It was already confirmed multiple times by official sources that -active- development started only in the late 2016 after Witcher 3 Blood and Wine DLC was complete. That's 4+ years of active development. Not 7+... You can absolutely see they needed more time to polish certain systems. If the game -actually- took 7+ years of developing it would've been way more polished on release I imagine.