Well I had to find a torrent in order to download the game I ****ing own cause I couldn't download it from GOG but I finally managed to install it. Galaxy fortunately recognised it as legitimate so it's just like they had another way to download the game other than HTTP as far as I'm concerned. At which point the game refused to start up. A few minutes poking around the forum suggested it's an issue with Galaxy. Uninstalling Galaxy allowed the game to run. So I was already rather annoyed by the time I started the game.
Fortunately I'd say it was worth the trouble. I'm having a lot of fun with the game, in fact I can't remember an RPG I enjoyed more. Just roaming around the countryside looking for trouble is kinda fun. Although that said, unlike previous Witcher games the sheer openess of the game means that you can very easily run into trouble. After the first village area you are allowed a hell of a lot more freedom and on at least two occasions that meant stumbling into a monster ridiculously higher than my challenge rating. Plus once you get further into the game the sailing option opens up and you can sail around the lake looking for trouble.
Dice poker is out (thank **** and good riddance to that save-scumming inducing rubbish) and has been replaced by Gwent, a collectable card game of the Magic:The Gathering ilk. Quite frankly Gwent is addictive enough that last night I spent 2 hours ignoring the rest of the RPG and going around the map challenging anyone I could find with unique cards. Who'd have thought that Geralt of Rivia would turn out to be a massive nerd?
There is a lot less reliance on the 3 schools of fighting in Witcher 3 than the other games. Combat is basically reduced to weak attack / weak attack / dodge / strong attack / set the ****er on fire with igni. But I don't mind that too much, the methods of combat in the first two were nice but somewhat annoying when you noticed that the reason some weak monster weren't dead yet was cause you'd forgotten to switch back to strong attack.
I'm not very keen on the level up system. Basically you get a point to spend on upgrades every level and can get more points by finding places of power). So by level 6 you can have spent 5 point on fast sword and one on Igni or you can distribute them around and be more of a generalist. BUT once you have spent those points you only have a limited number of slots you can put them in. So for instance at by level 10 you might have 16 points or so but you can only activate 6 slots meaning that you pushed to specialise in combat, signs, or alchemy. You can try to be a generalist but you will spend a lot of time on the character screen switching which upgrades you have in your slots. And that's before I mention that in order to activate the second level of power ups you need to have specialised. Let's say you want to upgrade your igni sign, you need to have spent 5 points in just igni to max out level one but also need have spent another point or two in other signs before the level 2 power ups even unlock. But since you probably don't have enough slots you have to specialise what you spend there, you can't just upgrade all your signs by one point.
That said, despite my complaints the level up system hasn't spoiled my enjoyment of the game. It was just that I found it much less open than the choices in the previous games. In general, if you liked the first two games, you'll love this one.