The game summarized in one word: Unforgiving.

With a Ryzen 5 5600X and RTX 3070 the game runs fine on max settings without DoF, Motion blur, and bloom. No crashes in my first 6 hours. Turn off super resolution/scaling to fix blurriness. The city is indeed choppy (45-55 fps) but that"s not the end of the world, and is likely to improve.

Microtransactions are not needed at all, they are shortcuts/bait.

Overall this is my cup of tea. I often get caught in a loop of starting over to achieve perfection, getting burnt out in the process. This game won"t let me do that, and even the tooltips reinforce: you can"t win them all, do your best and keep on.

The Good (for me):
The interactions with the pawns are neat. The combat has a high skill ceiling and a lot of cool combos. Forage-ables, enemies, and NPCs are easy to miss in the open world, favoring immersion over hand holding. Night time is DARK and your lanterns increase aggro.

The Bad (for anyone):
Mouse control is indeed bad, a controller is practically required. The mouse control is a 1:1 port from the controller stick code in that it treats your mouse inputs as if you are nudging a controller stick; it"s like mouse acceleration on steroids. The "Main" save file occurs when you sleep at the inn, but it costs gold to do so, and it is moderately annoying that I need to spend gold to secure a fail-proof save state.

TL;DR: If you play games on Hardcore mode and the Witcher 3 is in your top 10, you"re in for a good time. If you"re on the fence, wait for performance and mouse control patches.

The game summarized in one word: Unforgiving. With a Ryzen 5 5600X and RTX 3070 the game runs fine on max settings without DoF, Motion blur, and bloom. No crashes in my first 6 hours. Turn off super resolution/scaling to fix blurriness. The city is indeed choppy (45-55 fps) but that"s not the end of the world, and is likely to improve. Microtransactions are not needed at all, they are shortcuts/bait. Overall this is my cup of tea. I often get caught in a loop of starting over to achieve perfection, getting burnt out in the process. This game won"t let me do that, and even the tooltips reinforce: you can"t win them all, do your best and keep on. The Good (for me): The interactions with the pawns are neat. The combat has a high skill ceiling and a lot of cool combos. Forage-ables, enemies, and NPCs are easy to miss in the open world, favoring immersion over hand holding. Night time is DARK and your lanterns increase aggro. The Bad (for anyone): Mouse control is indeed bad, a controller is practically required. The mouse control is a 1:1 port from the controller stick code in that it treats your mouse inputs as if you are nudging a controller stick; it"s like mouse acceleration on steroids. The "Main" save file occurs when you sleep at the inn, but it costs gold to do so, and it is moderately annoying that I need to spend gold to secure a fail-proof save state. TL;DR: If you play games on Hardcore mode and the Witcher 3 is in your top 10, you"re in for a good time. If you"re on the fence, wait for performance and mouse control patches.