I have to agree with this. I recently tried to play The Witcher 3, after hearing so much praise about it. I played about 12 hours or so, and have never played the previous games, so that may colour my experience quite a bit.

For me The Witcher 3 was pretty standard open-world AAA fare. It seemed a little more focused than the likes of the more recent Assassin's Creeds or Dragon Age: Inquisition, perhaps, but absolutely in the same realm with many of the same problems. To me, it felt like a collect-a-thon on mini-map markers, just like other open-world games. The lack of character customization hurts it in my books, compared to something like Mass Effect (which has many similarities). I found the characters to be fairly archetypal fantasy tropes, and I found Geralt himself to be a typically two-dimensional, gruff, snarky protagonist with a chip on his shoulder.

In short, I found the story moments and dialogue I encountered to be boring, but then I also found the combat to be fairly un-engaging and repetitive, so that I really wasn't looking forward to doing anything. I thought it would get more interesting when I went from White Orchard to the first map area, but then the terrain/scenery looked the same as the previous area, so not even that could keep my interest. The thought of doing that for 60+ hours was just too much, so I hung it up.