The world is interesting, Geralt is a cool character to play, combat is nice enough, and first and foremost every quest is worth looking into.

The game has a ton of side quests that had more thought put into than the main quests of other games

Keep in mind that the main comparison point for it was Skyrim, which was pretty much the previous RPG people got sucked into.

The story was pretty good and it had a good number of meaningful side quests. Gwent was also a lot of fun, and the Blood and Wine DLC was another step above to keep the hype alive for longer. The combat can get fairly involved without feeling overly complex. Rather than the blank slate of many games of the era, you play as Geralt, who actually has relationships in the world to draw you in.

Basically, rather than the unfocused sandbox of random stuff in Skyrim, it was a more involved story-rich experience that a lot of people appreciated.

That said, the hype was ridiculous. It's a very good RPG, not the second coming of Christ. It didn't really do anything new, it was just a solid experience.

Storytelling/quests that surpassed anything its modern contemporaries had to offer. Add in a beautiful open world with alright combat and it's a hit in my books. Time also wasn't an issue back in those days as I were still in high school when it launched.

Movement and combat in every Witcher game is so unpleasant for me that I find them unplayable. I've literally gone through YouTube "Choose Your Own Adventure" style videos of the games because the stories are great but I hate how Geralt moves.

The story telling is what really did it for me. I consider witcher 3 to be the greatest game I've ever played. The quality of that game is still extremely high even to today's standards.

Skellige Island and the two expansions were actually great. Blood & Wine had an amazing flow. Otherwise I agree. It was a rehash of The Witcher 1, but not as charming.

Unpopular opinion: Many hyped up games fail immensely at some parts. But due to the social group effect criticism gets drowned out. Currently playing Elden Ring and while it makes a massively great impression all around it shows really bad game design cracks after more intense looking, especially in the boss and arena encounter design as if they were inexperienced. Cluttered, glitchy arenas impeding gameplay, just annoyingly specific roll tells, bad hitbox choices and the requirement to memorize full boss combo routes like a multiplayer fighter add to that 1-2 kill combos and it is terrible at times to me not we the effort. I am at Leyndell with almost all available side content/areas done. Waiting for the obligatory git gud chads storming in.

I played the full game and the dlcs. Only the 2nd dlc and the baron stories are good. Id suggest people just play the blood and wine dlc, its really great. The game isn't very fun, but I do love the atmosphere and city design. I was totally sick of looking at wet horse ass. Gwents more fun than monster hunting though sadly

I liked the alchemy in Witcher 2 more but the game mechanics with 3 and the RPG elements were amazing for me. And on par with Skyrim imo. In some aspects I liked Witcher more like how it affected the world building based on your actions.

For me it was too long. I finished it with all the DLC for the first time a few days ago. I generally enjoyed it but was also quite happy to be done with it when I finally finished it at around the 110 hour mark. I actually took a break after Hearts of Stone and played a couple of shorter games before I came back to finish off Blood and Wine.

I haven't yet played a single player game that I thought needed to be more than 60 hours no matter how engaging or well made it was.