It's not about difficulty at all. The game becomes very easy by mid game, but remains unresponsive.
In particular, the core attack mechanics are aggravating as hell. The two attack buttons can have any number of actual moves performed by pressing them. At close range, they're all very similar, but if you're passed an arbitrary range limit, Geralt uses one of his close in attacks. But those vary from a direct slide in and stab to a ridiculously over the top, arcing out whiling slice which has the tendency to send you flying directly into the pack of enemies, off center enough to ensure that any nearby foes in the pack will get an easy shot at you. If you get hit by one of those enemies, then you have to deal with not being able to dodge while in a 'hit animation'. Which might be okay, if it queued and you dodged the moment the animation was over, but it doesn't. Any command entered during an animation gets lost to the abyss.
The inability to cancel out of actions combined with a semi-random move selections, which are not by any means all equivalent, just adds up to stiffness. I don't much care for a game where the actual actions a button press will result in are not completely obvious. And in an action based game, any moves with animations long enough to leave you very open need to be either cancelable, or purposefully invoked. Not grouped with a number of other actions which don't leave anywhere near as open. It's equivalent to a version of street fighter where hard punch occasionally throws a regular punch, and occasionally a fireball move that leaves you open to counters.
It's as if the animators managed to ensure that every animation be played fully, gameplay be damned. By late game it doesn't much matter, since you're not instantly dead from a couple of hits, but it's still unresponsive.
Anyway, finally beat it. One huge, poorly thought out patch, followed by a "Can't start the game bug" which magically solved itself after an hour, managed to finish up the rest of the game. Not entirely sure what I think yet. It's not a bad game.....but there are a lot of very bad decisions made regarding the core mechanics.
And Foltest was a dick. Look how many people die in the prologue cause of his lover's quarrel. Still, compared to every other King in the game, he's really not that bad.
Actually, compared to most of the characters in the game, he's not that bad. By the end of the game, I'm wondering why Geralt doesn't just retire to a nice cabin in the mountains and let the damned monsters eat everyone. It's pretty much a world where I can let a grue eat anyone I see, and be confident that they did in fact deserve it.