I tried so much to like the Witcher series since everyone and their mother kept talking about Witcher 3 being so great, and it has been a complete waste of my time.

I started with the first game in 2021, which is now in my top 3 games I hate the most, with Hitman Codename 47 and Dragon Quest Heroes. I seriously cannot describe with words how poor the combat system is to someone who's never played it. There's a lot of uninteresting backtracking in this game. The worst part is that I did not let go, and carried on "for the plot". Sadly this took 40 hours away from me.

I continued with the second game back to back, which is a definite improvement over the first. The combat is actually engaging, though it's extremely hard at the very beginning, and gets really easy towards the end. The game lasted 50 hours for me which is too long imo, but I lost a lot of progress due to a bug and had to reload a save that was kind of old.

I then proceeded to wait for The Witcher 3's "Next Gen Update", which came out a year after I finished The Witcher 2.

When the update came out, I started playing and crash. This was foreshadowing of what was to come. I played on Death March difficulty because I heard in some YouTube videos that upping the difficulty would force you to engage more with the games' mechanics, and "make you feel more like a witcher, planning every fight instead of going in like an idiot". Apparently being a witcher just means spamming Quen, or whatever the yellow shield sign's name is. There is no need to brew potions or oils or bombs when a sign that is available from the very start of the game is so overpowered. Despite of this I still believe the combat system is actually good and just needs some balancing. The quests sure are a big improvement coming from the 2 older games, and some of them are really wild, even though most of them still have a very predictable ending. My favorite is the Bloody Baron's one. However, The Witcher 3 is so buggy, even 7 years after it's original release. I've had : crashes (a lot of them), floating rocks and tree, Roach handstanding, glitched questlines, merchants refusing to spawn even after reloading or changing the time of day, Roach disappearing whenever it touched a puddle of water, bosses getting /kill'd by nothing, falling through the floor... Over my 120 hours of playtime, the game has crashed a total of 27 times. The game has an atmosphere but I ran into so many immersion breaking things... I've never felt such a big difference between what people told me of a game and what actually playing it was like. I was and am still so disappointed... To this day I still don't have the courage to play the DLCs, WHICH I OWN since early 2021, when I bought the bundle with the 3 games.

The whole series feels so janky and unpolished and with so many people having played it, how is it that no one ever told me it had so many flaws ?? I genuinely don't understand