If this was another RPG like VTMB i would be mad for it going LE OPEN WORLD again, but since this is Witcher 1 which was almost open world in 2007 but with limitation i kind of expected this to be open world, so no surprises here, but im not expecting anything impressive, its just going to be your standard open world game with points of interests, again the strength here will be the quests themselves and not the open world mechanics, physics and interactivity.
Lets hope its not too big for its own good, and lets hope its not bloated and bugged.
Rubbish, Witcher 1 was unique and didn’t need open world treatment. How do they plan to stick to the story then?
That's fairly easy, you can make it so that you need an item to progress from one region to another and that item is tied to the main story, and near the chapter 2 for example you get an item to progress to the region that unlock chapter 3 but this time you can go back to region of chapter 2 to do side quests, in this way its like you unlock the open world part by part.
It can work.
But its the NuCDPR we are talking about, bet they will make it open world with high level so that when you enter another late game region you face everything higher level than you and one shots you, which is the worse way of implementing story path imo.