Unfortunately the timing of my review key plus downloading on Australian Internet TM means my review won't hit for awhile. I'm still early days to be honest, but it's really fucking wonderful and the map is absurdly huge when you consider the price.
And I mean, it's not just "let's recycle an immense amount of assets from the base game and thus make it huge". Obviously there is a decent bit of recycling, but so much effort has been poured into the new assets and the overall composition of the landscape and focus on an original tone that it really does feel like you're visiting
a totally different location compared to the Velen/Novigrad/Skellige/Skellige/Kaer Morhen combo. You're uprooted and taken to a place that aesthetically and tonally is 100% distinct from everything in the base game; the way characters talk and dress, the newly recorded NPC chatter, the shape of the landscape, the colours and tones sweeping the horizon, the clouds in the sky, the bright stars at night, and so on.
I stood in my vineyard, the sweeping, colourful Toussaint valley before me, and upon whistling for Roach I realised CDPR had put a nice little echo as the pitch bounces down the sprawling vista. That's when it hit I was somewhere totally new, and deliberately so.
Here's some cheap pics I took.