Lighting and foliage are ugly in sunrise and sunset. But with normal midday and midnight times the game is nice. Though full-moon night is clear as day. I'm running it with everything in ultra, HBAO+ on, depth of field and chromatic aberration off, blur off. The hair thing is on, and the only FPS below 30 was in the cutscene where geralts notices the doll ciri was fighting had a person. It was bothering me to the point i'd turn it off, but the game is playing very smoothly since that part, between 45-50 FPS, which I'm actually ok with it.
But there are gorgeous sights to behold, like the characters you can talk with (not random NPCs), each one is very unique and I didn't find any repeated face yet, and they're very well done. Textures are sharp enough for a vanilla game.
Oh, the water is a hideous gelatin.
Overall, it's very atmosperic and reminds me of witcher 1 vibe.
My rig is i7-2600 + 16Gb Ram + GTX970.
Combat is similar to witcher 2 but I yet have to master the control scheme, you use shift+mb1 to strong attack and mb1 alone for fast attack, since mouse 2 is used for defending/parrying.
Random NPCs are like NPCs in the witcher series: Lots of peds that repeat a set of frases, just like in W1 and W2. So this game feels like a GTA game. Thou as I said there's lots of unique NPCs also, and they're cool.
The interface is better that witcher 2, and you can actually manage the menus using just a mouse and some shortcut keys without having to constantly change your hands position on the Kb. But still dsigned for controllers.
I said it has a GTA vibe, and some people were geting the gothic vibe. Well, I was walking around with geralt and I jumped close to a small shack and he grabbed the roof's ledge, something I didn't intent to do but remindme of gothics similar ability, in the way geralt's animatiion behaved. But that's the only thing gothic wise, because i remember gothic's NPC to be unique, each one having a name and function, while in the witcher 3 we have generic people populating the area. Oh, also you have GPS GTA style, which marks the way you have to follow, and a key that you pres and your horse follows that direction with no need for your input.
I'm using a witcher 2 save, where I side with roche and he is now allied with radovid and wearing red, letho is alive, Síle is alive. I'm eager to see what are they doing now.
