In regards to the game itself...
The game's main plot kind of disappointed me towards the end, aswell as the last act/battle with the WIld Hunt. It felt a bit too "fantasy" to me, with all the magic and stuff. But it didn't make me like the game any less.
The choices, other than some in the Bloody Baron questline and at the very end with Ciri, didn't really matter much I think, aswell as your choices from Witcher 2. The most you get out of them is a little side quest with Letho and his cameo in the Battle at Kaer Morhen. Henselt dies anyway, Vergen gets fucked anyway, mages get hunted anyway, Triss and Geralt split up anyway... Though I actually liked how they handled the Ciri choices. Be a controlling and overprotective dad to her? She won't want to come back to you.
About the open world, I like that there are zones. What I don't like however is accidentally coming to the end of them and getting thrown into the map. They could have done it better, like barricaded the ends of the zones with something, or maybe a stupidly high leveled monster that doesn't let you pass, instead of just throwing you into the world map. Kind of kills immersion and reminds me that it's just a game.
I wouldn't say the combat suffered, I think it's fantastic. Though, they definitely made it less brutal since the gameplay demos last year. Way less blood (which is just a paint-like texture now instead of actually looking like fluid like it used to), the screen doesn't shake nearly as much and it even "sounds" less brutal.
The graphics are obviously not as good as advertised. Not nearly as good as the 2013 videos and not as good as the 2014 trailers and 2014 gameplay demos. End of discussion. Geralt's character model is better, but everything else is worse. Draw distance LOD, lighting (especially indoors), color palette, everything. If they wouldn't have shown it off even last year, it wouldn't bother me at all though. They're still OK, though the game doesn't perform well enough consider how it looks.
I feel as if the game was casualised aswell. Unlimited oils, potions and bombs refilling everytime you meditate.... It just doesn't make sense why they'd do this other than to appeal to casuals and people who didn't play the previous games.
And they've said they delayed the game so much to fix bugs. Kind of weird considering how many bugs there are in the game, and how worse the game started to look after the delays. Gee, I wonder what happened during the delays.
Regarding CDPR...
I pretty much can't trust them anymore. It's easy to see they've turned into just another AAA dev. Showing off an incredibly good looking game just to make it look worse, the PC version feels like an afterthought (b-but muh hairworks), giving typical PR non-answers constantly and outright lying on their own forums to their own fans (I'm talking about the whole graphics controversy and how it was promised the game will look exactly like the SoD trailer when it's released), and of course that famous "slap in the face" quote. In terms of hyping up fake footage and PR they're no better than Ubisoft and the rest of them.
The worst thing about it is there are still tons of people on forums (not just these) who just can't see this, they're blinded by CDPR's "good guys" marketing shtick and defend them as if their lives depended on it, and no bigger media outlet will report on the downgrade and lies like they did with Watch Dogs, simply because it's not "cool" to criticize CDPR as much as it was to criticize Ubisoft.
So I guess it worked out for CDPR in the end. Got a shitload of money, sales and new fans and the vast majority doesn't care about the downgrade and whatnot.
Witcher 3 was the only game I was actually looking forward to in the last 4 or so years, after beating W2, and CDPR were supposed to be different than the rest of the industry, but I guess that's what happens. Still love the game, it's amazing and one of the best I've ever played, but it's disappointing to see what happened to CDPR.