I bought this game when it was initially released in the US and finally finished it. When I started playing I made it to chapter 2, but the dialog and exposition was so bad I could not go on with it. Then I read about the extended edition that would fix this so I just waited. Once the EE came out I started over and much of the game made more sense. Here is what I liked about the game:• The witcher character is interesting and I enjoyed playing him.• The gray area decisions were great. I loved not having the black and white “good” and “evil” options. RPGs should do much more of this.• I loved the cutscenes that would pop up to show you how a previous decision is affecting the current situation. This was fantastic.• I liked the mature aspects of the game as this is not some bright and flowery fantasy world. It reminded me of the Gothic series. • I enjoyed seeing subjects like racism and terrorism rather than the usual rehashed fantasy garbage.• The graphics, sound, and music were great.• I liked the alchemy system. I never craft potions, but I found it intuitive and simple in The Witcher (and necessary).What I did not like:• The game engine. I hate, hate, hate feeling so confined by artificial walls, and I know this is how the aurora engine works, but not being able to jump down a tiny incline in a field because the game won’t let me move over that area breaks the immersion. I was stuck on a broken bridge because two NPCs had moved to the front of the bridge and would not let me pass as they were in combat with a centipede. There was a curb on the side of the bridge that was maybe 6 inches high. If I could have walked onto that curb I could have walked around the NPCs, but the engine marked that section as impassible. I’m OK with areas you cannot access, but make it realistic that I cannot access them. I guess I’m spoiled by the Gothic and Elder Scrolls series. I hope they use a different engine for their next Witcher game that relies on physics rather than what they have now. This is my biggest gripe.• I thought the stats system was way too simple. It was all for combat. I know the game really wasn’t designed to use any other stats (like speech for example). In the next game I’d like to see stats for other things like alchemy, speech, traps, barter, and others that actually have an effect in the game. I never really paid attention to most of the stats items I upgraded and it didn’t seem to matter.• The combat bored me. Click, wait for flame sword icon, click, wait for flame sword icon, click…maybe throw in an igni here and there.Now I did like the different styles and sword types, but that didn’t make the combat much more interesting.• The main plot never sucked me in. I never really cared about what I was doing. I just didn’t care about the Salamandra or who was behind them and never really felt like they were a threat to the world. I felt the human\non-human strife was a bigger issue.• I wish there was more history of the world. While the witchers were pretty fleshed out, I really didn’t have much backstory on the world. Every location I went to didn’t mean much. I’m sure the witcher books have plenty of backstory and I wish they would have added it to the game. Maybe they did and I missed it somehow.• This game needed some sort of fast travel system. Maybe it does and I didn’t figure it out, but I would have loved a way to travel from wherever I was to another map area. I did a lot of running around back and forth between areas that became tedious. It would have been nice to be able to fast travel from wherever I was to another area like from the swamp to Vizima.• All the underground crypts and caves were boring after the first few. They were all cookie-cutter.Overall I liked the game. The main thing that made me not love it was the limitations of the engine and the combat. I love the witcher character and look forward to playing more games with him.