Tiny boat we're in. I started with the witcher 2 right after having played dragon's dogma and couldn't handle the extremely clunky combat. My friends assured me 3 was a huge step forward and I was harassed to play the whole game on stream, and I did. Honestly, not that big of a step, the world felt starkly dead compared to other open world fare, the combat was years behind games that came out at the same time, and the story and setting did not feel very unique to me at all.

I felt the same way about a lot of the heavier dialogue that people did at large about Forspoken. Plot felt like it was on stilts, barely hitting the points it needed to to keep my interest. Not that it was out of context bits like Forspoken, but the dialogue felt out of touch with the setting really frequently. Poor selection of magic despite what was shown to you in-setting. Build balancing like an mmo where nothing you craft or otherwise come into owning early on actually mattered at all. 15 more armor was not changing the number of hits you could take in a fight it all.

TW 3 wasn't super inventive or even really fun compared to other games that launched when it did or even before, and I don't understand the extreme hype for it when everyone I talk to says the first two games are so wildly different and worth skipping, which has been my experience. If it's not about the characters' story arcs across all 3 games, what the hell is it that makes people enjoy it so much? I've looked hard, I've played hard, and I just never found it.