I mentioned earlier that this game wasn't clicking for me. Well, I sat down yesterday around 8:00 am to play, having just finished the tutorial area the previous evening, and I would up playing almost continuously until 9:30 pm, with only meal breaks stuck in there. I guess that means it clicked.
The combat is pretty so-so, but the storylines are a lot of fun. The conclusion of quest with the orphanage in the woods was almost worth the price of the game itself. Like Bucky, I killed the tree and loved the outcome when I went back to the orphanage.
Also, Gwent is hands-down the best game-within-a-game I've encountered. If you watched me play W3, you'd think it was about an aspiring Gwent player who occasionally had to kill a monster because it was standing between him and an innkeeper two towns over who might have a worthwhile card to sell. The AI is really easy to beat at this point, and my deck is grossly overpowered for almost everybody I encounter. The only person I haven't been able to beat is the woman who hangs out with the master armorer, because she has a stacked monster deck that completely overwhelms me when it starts summoning in helpers. I'm sure the end of the main storyline will involve my plucky underdog character finally beating her when I really need to, and her telling her goons "Pay that man his money" a la Teddy KGB. Maybe they'll be a dragon or something mixed in there along the way, but she's obviously the main villain in the game.
