The Witcher is kind of unusual for doing everything in its power as a game to make the player feel absolutely helpless. You are just basically a puppet, completely controlled by the devs, and I find it strange that more people don't have a problem with it when discussing the game. This is evident in every aspect of The Witcher's design, from the way many cutscenes plunge you into difficult combat, right into the middle of a bunch of hostiles, to the way there are often many long (looooong) cutscenes before difficult fights without an easy way to save beforehand (sometimes spam-clicking quick-save works), to the way many interactions only make sense if you talk to the people in the order the devs intended, to the way most maps, while looking "open" are actually tight corridors with fences/trees blocking you from most of the map, to the way you spend half the game in either cutscenes or loading screens, to the way the way dialogue is structured with NPCs often giving you information that you are neither entitled to nor understand fully, so you end up running after the game as it plays itself.
Don't get me wrong, there are things to like about it, for sure, but PS:T gets a lot of flak from certain people here for being more of a book than a game, but for me, PS:T is a LOT more about gameplay than The Witcher. Playing the latter, I often smirked to myself, here I am playing Cutscene: The Game.
And to the people a couple of pages back saying The Witcher is a lot like Gothic,
. These two games are nothing alike aside from some superficial similarities, such as over the shoulder 3rd person view or coming from a European company. The only thing they have in common beyond that is having decent NPC schedules. But fundamentally, they are completely different. Gothic games are all about gameplay, with the story/dialogue being pretty bare-bones, just good enough to give gameplay context and provide incentive to do things, but nothing beyond that. Were there any truly memorable characters or storylines in Gothic or Gothic 2? I don't think so. But the gameplay was amazing. You had your open world sandbox, check, great melee combat, check, great exploration, check, fun character development, check.
The Witcher is the exact opposite. It had some great writing, and was full of memorable characters and storylines, but had absolute horseshit for gameplay. Shit combat, shit exploration, shit character development. Narrative driven world structure with only small parts of the world available at any time, and even those constrained by ever-present fences, quests with the game telling you EVERYTHING you had to do to the tiniest detail with a couple of exceptions and then tracking/compassing it for you as well.