A beautiful world and a great storyline but the game suffers from sooo many flaws beyond that...
What's even worse is the non intuitive UI that i found it took me ages to get used to, still not 100% used to it too. With Oblivion everything just made sense and i loved that, however with The Witcher not so good lol. I don't like how you switch stances, i would have much prefered it just being one button to cycle through them instead of having to hold CTRL z,x or c each time I don't like the inventory which is sooo hard to find stuf in because sooo small pictures and you have to put your mouse over it to see what it is. I also found the character improvement pages to not be intuitive aswel and found it to be quite daunting at first.
Also theres far too many cut scenes in the game which are very needless and i don't understand why the NPC's can't talk to you in game instead of having to keep taking you out of game too. Also it's very annoying being in cities and towns and because the games quite unstable you often get crashes (on a 4gb ram XP 8800gt core 2 duo 6700) and long loading times everytime you go in and out of the houses is very annoying too.
I found the storyline of the Witcher to be great and i wont spoil any of it for you but theres lots of action and romance and sad moments and takes you through all the ranges of emotion. I found the game to be about 50/60 hours long for me and thats a fantastic length specially for a story.
The world is beautiful in Thw Witcher and they've done a rgeat job creating it, lots of breath taking places. However it's very linear and i found it a real step back from Oblivion, much more beautiful than Oblivion but i just hate all the invisible walls and not being able to go places when you want. The world seems to have a impact on performance aswel and i can't really see why seeing as games like Crysis run better for me, i'm guessing it just wasn't optimized very well.
The sounds and music are all fantastic and personally my fave thing is the fantastic music that really makes the game for me, the guy who created the music really has done a great job. The voice acting and animations on the voice acting arn't very good and thought it was quite bad IMO. Alot of the lip syncing aswel just isn't very good and just becomes annoying.
It has some side quests but not really to Oblivions standard and the game has stuff to craft and lots of items in it but again not to Oblivions standed. hats a repeating pattern here and i wish i never played Oblivion before hand because it's really just set the bar soo high for me. The Witcher is more like KOTOR style rather than Oblivion and for me thats just too linear and restrictive.
End of the day The Witcher has a great story and offers alot of choice in the story and has alot of beauty but apart from that theres alot i just don't like. The game is a good game and i enjoyed playing it just the flaws of it really do bring it down.
However this is only my opinion and it's worth giving it a try, just for me, it's not as good as Oblivion.