So I finished my playthrough and here are my thoughts. Overall the game gets a 10/10 for me, but it's still not perfect. I alternated between PS5 and PC. I did ALL of the sidequests, got all the Witcher 3 and earned a platinum trophy and also earned all the GOG achievements (not that anyone cares about those). This is a very underrated feature and I hope cross platform play becomes a thing. I went to my moms house, played Witcher 3 on my laptop, picked it up again on PS5 when I wanted to be in my living room and played it at max settings on my main 4090/7800X3D PC at 4K/120. That sort of platform cross play needs to become gold standard. Plus, it enabled me to put some time saving cheats and carry those cheats over to PS5!
The great:
1. I absolutely LOVED the QoL improvements, such as decreasing the amount of skill points needed to really make a build.
2. The oil autoapply is the single best QoL improvement EVER. I am surprised that CDPR put this one in, since reading the Beastiary's and figuring out the right potion to use was part of the game. Auto-applying oils took that away. Basically it was a free buff, if you had the oils in your inventory.
3. Allowing the right trigger to use signs was a god send of an amazing feature that took me a while to get used to, but it was so damn nice not having to switch between signs. Nobody should play without that feature.
4. Turning the RS into the run was nice as well.
5. They tweaked some of the Runewrights, which I can't say I took advantage of.
6. The new quest for the new Witcher gear was great and pretty damn messed up.
Mixed feelings:
1. They nerfed Euphoria which was a build that decimated anything if you used the right decoctions. It was still formidable, but it did allow me to try out other builds and I ended up settling on the Wolf Gear/ Conductors of Magic, where Igni just absolutely melted every single thing in the game. So it wasn't all bad.
The disappointments:
1. No real new content that fixed issues in the previous game. I was and many others were hoping (but not realistically expecting) that they would go back and restore parts of the Catrionic plague with Iorveth plotline. It didn't have to be big, but its a huge plothole for that character to be so brazingly cast aside.
2. Fixed the Reason of State where you have to kill Djistra. I didn't think much of it before, but the writing for that portion of the game is so absolutely god awful. They could have kept everything the same, while it would still have been "bad" it wouldn't have required characters like Djistra doing something so stupidly out of character.
3. Would have been nice to have killed that final crone and retrieved Vesamirs medallion.
4. On a personal note, I would have liked them to have added a few more mutagen slots.
Technical Issues:
1. The game crashes quite a bit. It happens on PC and PS5, suggesting the issue is game related. Its many times worse when you turn RTX and Frame Generation (FG) on. One thing that was gauranteed to crash the game was when I tried dye multiple parts of witcher clothing at once on PC. Never tried it on PS5 or with RT off. I should have. Be warned, the game will crash from time to time. When it crashed it would always crash before an autosave and/or loading a new area or dying witcher gear in a new color. I can't recall a time it froze up in a random place.
2. Ray tracing causes all sorts of weird pop-in issues and weird random lighting of areas. It could be pretty distracting at times.
Plot hole confusion:
1. For as powerful as the Wild Hunt is, I never understood how they didn't quickly regroup and attack Kaer Morhen if they can freely move between time and space. Ciri was no longer hiding at that point. What stopped them from attacking Novigrad, Skellige during the final preparations and such?
2. The Wild Hunt left and awful lot of time for Geralt and his crew to fortify their positions after she escaped from the Isle of Mists. It struck me as a odd that they didn't immediately follow and try to get the jump on Ciri. I feel like I missed something here that could have at least partially explained this.
. There'll be so much melt down.
