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thanks for the tips! sounds great. I think I already have the GOTY edition so that's all good. What difficulty did you play it on out of interest? I feel like it's probably the kind of game that benefits from being hard but I'm not sure.
zooeyzooey-
just normal for me.
starting out the enemies are quite tough. in that sense it's like elden ring that you need to level up a bit and get some decent kit before you feel confident going into most fights, it's easy to wander into an area that will fuck you up too as there's lots of roaming monsters but roach is like torrent in that he'll get you out of harms way most of the time. also like ER you can get overwhelmed easily if you get surrounded but the difference is the weapon system in witcher 3 gives you a bit more to work with early on to mitigate that and the bosses aren't as insane as the fromsoft nightmare fuel. but at the end of my first 150hr playthrough when i was feeling pretty godlike i wandered onto an unmarked island with a secret griffin like monster that just wrecked me immediately and that thing killed me about 30 times before I finally beat it so there are challenges.
HatBeard
for witcher 3 I'd buy/install the DLC at the outset so the stuff is discoverable organically if you dont have the game of the year edition.
you possibly may not get such a big wow factor from it as original players as ER has some of the key things that made you go wow as well, whereas W3 was pretty unique when it was first out which made it feel much more ground breaking.
i'd recommend trying to find a guide to make sure you get all the gwent cards in the early game and make not of the ones that get locked away by story choices and one time access dungeons as it's one of the best mini-games out there and you'll go mad knowing there's possibly some cards missing.
and finally lean heavily into the potions concoctions and oil crafting stuff with the skill tree skills to go with them, I did a hack and slash for my first playthrough saving everything for "when I needed it" and it was fine but very repetitive, on my new game plus I switched to using all the correct oils and a combination of potions and skills that would turbo charge geralt but also put him at the edge of his corruption/poisoning or whatever its called and it was not only way more thematic he turns into the absolute killing machine he's billed as.