1) This is a grand experience and I need to really take it all in nice and slow

2) I have a fear that this might be the last time a game sets the bar so high, especially as far as content-rich open world games go.

10€ more isn’t quite worth those digital things though, I suppose. I had it preordered from GoG and think it was just around 45€ then and not the price the game is now, could be wrong though.

You are also on point with the Witcher 2 UI, I remember not doing much alchemy/crafting etc. there as well since it was such a bother.

I’m 50 hours in myself and haven’t reached act 2 yet. I’ve greyed out every map icon in Velen and Novigrad and tried to complete every quest that was in my level range in those two areas and have finally started to to quests in Skellige.
It’s amazing how captivating the game still is, even though categorically going through those map icons shouldn’t be fun otherwise. I’m excited to see where the story will go and up to now I liked what has happened there. In comparison to Skyrim this is another huge advantage W3 has over the Elder Scrolls game, since the story there was utterly dull and uninteresting to no end.

The UI is a nightmare indeed. There’s so much wasted space and I can’t even imagine how the crafting list is sorted (definitely not by the items level, which would make a lot of sense). Why are the crafting materials between the gloves and the breast armors, why not on the top or the bottom of that huge list? Why is it a huge list that doesn’t go all the way down on the monitor? Why is the inventory in such a tiny screen? Why do some of the inventory screens sort themselves sometimes?
As far as I can remember the inventory and UI in W2 were terrible as well but one might think they’d try to improve that part in a sequel. I’m sure the’ve gotten negative feedback about it back then as well.

My worry after completing #2 was that the fact that I gave up trying to follow the endless exposition would effectively ruin the third game for me, but it seems like that’s not the case. I also didn’t get on with the combat at all in the second and ended up playing the second half on easy which was much too easy (I probably should have dialled it back up, but I didn’t care at that point).

I think the message for me here is to complete Dragon Age Inquisition before diving into this, because I get the impression I won’t want to go back to it once I start.

I’ve been longing for a good sci-fi FPS/RPG, hopefully with a fairly open world. Has there even been one before? Deus Ex games are probably the closest, but even those are a little too scripted / on-rails for what I’m looking for.