I'm a big fan of The Wither series. Reading the stories from 1986 till the end. Have TW2 collector's edition and still playing the game (not every day so I can enjoy it longer:)) but I have to say the first part was better.
TW2 is a strange mix of
* resident evil linear slashing
* free city door to door roaming
* free outdoor adventuring.
The good
* graphics - excellent, great, awesome, you name it. I guess it supports all the Dx11 stuff like film DOF and maybe even tesselation. Move animation, fights, day/night/ water/ rain/ It all looks gorgeous (well, the HDR is little over the edge). I've added a screenie to the post. Yes, it looks that good.
* music - epic, but worse then the 1st part. Maybe I will like it more after decoding all the ingme music files. In 1st part there were the best piecies. Not on the soundtrack.
* fights - fast and furrious, challenging, sometimes too challenging. It's not DA kind of watch/click skill/click potion/ or DA2 watch/watch/watch. You need to mix light and srong hits and dodge always. Never stay in one place... and use the 'signs' also.
* optimization (on my machine) with HD resolution and all options maxed out (without ubersampling) I get minimal of 25 FPS but stable 40 to v-synced 60. The game never crashed on me so it's good point too.
The bad
* The "freedom" is a lie. Witcher still can't jump, only in marked places that are sometimes hard to spot. All areas are claustrophobic. Great forrest appears to be a few "corridors" with invisible walls. All of the houses have similar insides.
* The dialogs have nothing to do with the ones from books. The writers thoughts that "rich, mature story" is achieved by more cursing. This is NOT Sapkowski's school. The curses in books were "salt&pepper" for a fine dish of interesting, light, natural dialogues. In TW2 games the curses are almost all the effort of the makers (apart of 'the boobs scenes') to make a adult plot. Damn! I hate it because the whole plot altogether is not bad.
The ugly
* dialog animations - especially the faces - well it's not the GTA4 unfortunatelly.
* dialog options - very little ammount of real choices. More like - tell me abutt A and then B and C. Or tell my abiut B first, then C and A last. No real impact on the story.
* interface - in most parts it's great. Skill tree and equipment but... but but but... no comparing options in crafting and shopping windows. No sorting options. No memorizing option for all kind of recipes, no 'N' sign at minimap and static quest markers on multilevel maps... that's just ugly.
* ballance - I was trying to get by one point for about 3,4 hours and was literally throwing my mouse around the room. But then with another tactic I've managed to make it in 5 minutes. Is it encouraging the not linear approach? I don't think so.
In my opinion the game is somewhere between 7-8/10 and I am fan of the character. Some things can be improved by patches but some are just bad design choices. While waiting for release I've played the first part and it's still great. Especially with the Academy Award nominee Tomasz Bagiński intro & outro movies.