It's sight to behold to see Codex is being more possitive about this game than subreddit about it.
It's because pessimists only have pleasant surprises. The more you get into it, the more pleasantly surprising it is. Still a mess in some aspects obviously, but you can definitely get some fun out of it if you have a high tolerance level for AAA games, and if they sort it out it'll be very good in about a year, though probably never stellar. (But chances are they'll just tidy up the worst bugs and move on to this multiplayer shit they're talking about - how they think they're going to manage to squeeze lots of players into it when it's already struggling with all the NPCs, etc., is a mystery to me. But maybe in a couple of years? I dunno, it's rickety enough as it is without having lots of live players in it too.)
I'll tell you what it is actually. All games have some balance between two kinds of immersion, or between two kinds of trance state. The gameplay trance state and the virtual world trance state; the engagement with systems and challenges and the engagement with a sense of "being there" in another time, place, etc.
No game is completely without either of these two forms of immersion (or whatever one might want to call them), and no gamer is totally without
some feeling for both, but developers weight their games one way or the other, and gamers' preference are weighted one way or the other.
CDPR have always been better at the "being there" sense of immersion than the gameplay sense of immersion. And while most Codexers probably weight more towards gameplay, those of us who weight more towards "being there" immersion probably find this more congenial than those of us who weight more towards gameplay, so with a game like this we're prepared to cut it
some slack if it's good at the thing we weight towards, even if we know that objectively it could be much, much better in all ares.
It's as simple as that really.