Phoenixmgs said:
I have huge problems with saying reviews should have "objective" pros and cons because nothing is objective. For example, Witcher 3 has an objectively functional loot system; however, it has no place in the game in my opinion. Am I being objective if I say that it's an objective con or am I being "biased" and "subjective" for saying that?
I agree, subjectivity is what you really want from a review. I think a lot of the calls for objectivity are more that a reviewer bagged in a game someone else liked or, more bizarrely, a publisher that people liked and those people want them to be nicer to the thing they liked. See Jim Sterling's totally objective review for how utterly useless a genuinely objective review would be.
There's also the fact that some flaws might not detract from your enjoyment of a game badly enough to even count as a minus to the individual reviewer. The Witcher 3 is one of my favourite games ever, hands down. I would probably give it a 9-10/10 on my personal scale just based on how much I loved it but I acknowledge it has problems.
The Skellige map involves too much fast travel or boating, something they realise themselves since they sell maps so you can fast travel without the boating there first, but only in Skellige.
The dialogue is quite cute but there's too little incidental dialogue, the number of times I heard 'so I was faffing about...' running past that one street in Novigrad was unreal, they should either silence it most of the time or have more lines.
Once you notice it it's very obvious how much handing stuff over takes place off screen to avoid animating hands.
Loot is rendered pointless once you know what you're doing, Serpent/Temerian -> Feline -> armour of choice is the objectively best way to run your loadout so the Cidarian gambesons are a waste of time.
Some of the voice acting is pretty weak, most notably Triss for me.
The multiple currencies are confusing until you realise two of the three aren't really currencies, they're items that only two vendors will buy.
Roach homing in on horsey things when you dismount is awesome, but she shouldn't walk through frozen dialogue sections, telling Triss it's good to see her when staring at a horse butt is just weird.
Doing quests outside of the CDPR suggested order is possible and I love that, but you will ruin the game if you do Blood & Wine before finishing the main quests. Last playthrough I did it as soon as I could, just before the Isle of Mists, and after getting grandmaster ursine with the free Quen shield runeword meant I could just tank everything else in the game, even the bosses were insignificant because I was around 15 levels above their suggested level and had excellent gear.
And so on. But none of that stuff really detracted from the game for me, not in a meaningful way anyway. All those problems and flaws dudn't detract from my enjoyment and if I was asked to recommend the game I would wholeheartedly.
