UI has been redone with the new DLC. The combat can be annoying, but once you get your spells leveled up it becomes really fun. You can use mind control on enemies, unleash a shockwave that freezes enemies, have a bubble shield that explodes, places spirit traps to slow down enemies, beef up your sword skills and start hacking people apart with counterattacks, tons of buffers and effects to play around with. Turn up the difficulty, and it can be like playing chess at times. Each enemy has its own strategy to beat.
Story builds, he's trying to track down his surrogate daughter and the bad guys are the Wild Hunt who are like trans dimensional sorcerers and warriors, but it's more about the journey for me. The side quests are great, the choices made in the main quest are similar to Game of Thrones or the Waking Dead in that sometimes there are no clean good or bad choices, sometimes you have to live with a bad one. Do you save a town or let children get butchered? Lots of morally grey characters and choices, especially when involving the northern politics. The whole thing is very dark once you get into Velen and come across citizens hanged by the dozens, murdered children, people impaled and burned at the stake, etc.
Since making that post, I powered through the first ten hours and finished the rest of the game (finished Blood & Wine just a couple of hours ago), and boy was I wrong.
The choices in the dialog tree and subsequent consequences on the story are absolutely incredible. Like revolutionary. I really couldn't believe they put in so much content where they could afford not having players go through a linear storyline. Although, at times, you regret some of the choices you make, and you try and go back to get the best possible outcome.
The graphics and the world are extremely impressive, and once you get in the groove of handling all of the features through the UI, you really begin to appreciate all of the features they put in the game (IE: alchemy, crafting, abilities, etc). The dialog animations/cutscenes are probably the best I've seen, and put Bethesda to shame.
The thing I was wrong about the most was Gwent. For a good portion of the early stages of this game, I played primarily so I could seek out more Gwent games. Once you find a challenging opponent, and start spamming spy cards for a tactical advantage on quantity of cards, it becomes an insanely rewarding minigame. I just wish there was more of it, because there was not enough Gwent!
One of the things I appreciated about Witcher 3 which was a problem in other games was the accumulation of money/gold. Everything seems to cost money (IE: crafting armour, making potions, etc), and only a few times throughout the game did I find that I had a noticeable excess of what I needed. Otherwise, throughout most of the game, I was at the position where I had some gold, but not a whole lot. This made taking contracts and getting paid via missions even more rewarding for the ongoing character development, and when there was a point in the game where you needed A LOT of gold (IE: the Ofieri sword upgrades which were like 30,000 gold for all of them in "Hearts of Stone"), it gave you yet another reason to play.
I'll still maintain that the mechanics/combat are terrible. Probably the worst I've ever seen in an AAA game. Aside from Igni, I found using signs to be mostly tedious (breaking away from the live action), and the sword play was very formulaic (swipe, swipe, dodge). But the mechanics are the real issue (especially Roach), and the UI decision to have a "Press A" popup (which often times doesn't pop up) in order to do things like mount Roach was horrible. Actually, I'll also maintain that the UI / UX is also the worst I've seen in an AAA game. Nothing like having to go through the inventory and select each icon one-by-one to find what oil/potion/bomb you're looking for.
But all-in-all, it was an excellent gaming experience. For the next one, they just need to focus in on making the first 5-10 hours as accommodating as possible, and not throw you into the deep end with the lore, characters, pre-existing storylines from the previous game, etc.