Don't know what it was like before, but bought it in the recent Steam sale and have been most impressed. Looks great, runs butter-smooth, not a hitch or a hiccup anywhere, and not one crash in thirty hours
I do like the 'Sleeping Dogs' style of open world, with tagged up story missions and lots of interesting hand-crafted side missions, which you can role-play your way through - you can resolve missions by talking or sneaking or straight-up combat as desired. Exactly as expected from the studio that made the Witcher games. Much better than eg. a 'Fallout 4' style really-open but barely-interactive world, where every single quest might as well be 'radiant'-ly generated; so many of them, but barely any difference between them.
Never played it at launch, but the main complaints seem to have been buggyness (fixed), bad vehicle handling (seems fine to me) and 'emptyness'. There seems plenty to do; I don't want ten million pointless things in a game to pad it out, no 'climbing a watchtower then jumping off into a bundle of hay in order to fill up the map with a thousand busywork icons' for me.
It was brutal at launch. I didn't have a lot of bugs but I did have really bad performance and a he'll of a lot of crashes. I fell in love with the game itself though its one of my favourite rpgs now. Picked it back up after I upgraded my graphics card and had way better performance and a lot of updates had come out by that time. Stoked for the dlc