I played in the closed beta. Enjoyed it a played it for many hours (wasn't massively into it like I'm sure some people were!). I'm not enjoying the changes in Open Beta though, and this is a bit of a long post.
The text changes / keywords to cards have been confusing the hell out of me, and making this not as fun to play as the closed beta. The amount of times I've mistakenly played cards because I didn't understand a keyword completely is baffling.
I do think having a structured vocabulary is a good thing. It provides a much better framework for people to learn cards, and probably for the developers to create cards. I think they need to find some way to lessen the cognitive load with the new card text though. Before, card text was very descriptive. Read the description, and you know what it does. Now, you read the card text and every bold word I need to then cross-reference against the tool tip. It does not make Gwent as accessible as it used to be, so I'm hoping they can polish up both language and presentation (maybe iconography would help?). One thing which is still confusing me is Spawn vs Summon. One day I'll hammer that in my head...
There are other overall text issues which bug me. For example, there's a gold card (forgetting the name) which says "Draw 2 cards, then Discard 2 from your Hand". Simple enough. I play the card when I have 2 cards in my hand, so it shows me 4 cards after it draws 2 from the deck. The only text on the screen says "Choose 2". I chose the 2 I wanted, which obviously is not what that meant (I then lost the game because I kept two shit cards for my situation). Sure, it's small and I probably won't make that same mistake again, but this is just one quick example showing how they need to be simple and precise with their language.
The other thing is that they need to have the keyword tooltips show up everywhere, including when you are picking cards. Some of the cards have like 6 keywords or something, and there are very important subtle details in there that can be easily missed especially as I'm learning keywords.
One other problem I've encountered is that it can be very frustrating to think you understand a card, play it for its deploy effect, but then once the game tries to have you make a choice you can't do anything. For example, an archer card had text that said "Deploy - Deal 1 damage to 3 targets" or something like that. My opponent only had 2 enemies out, so I had to target one of my own allies. I wish I could have cancelled playing that card because the game in a way taught me what it did right then and there. Instead, I was just stuck with it. They should do it like Hearthstone does (from what I remember) where you can cancel cards which have targeting effects, until you've done all of its effects. In the above example, I would have played the card, selected 2 of the enemies, realize my only other option was to target my own and then I would have cancelled playing it.
Finally, and I guess I was a bit surprised by this, but there were a surprising amount of regressions in even simple things like properly showing the health of an enemy. I used decoy on a boosted enemy. The health text on the board was one number, the power it gave me was another, and when I zoomed in on the card there was a third number for the same card! I need to see if I can reproduce it and file a bug. Those sorts of core issues have popped up in my first 6 games.
I'll end it with positivity though! I LOVE how much more strategic things feel. Weather changes are neat. I have to relearn some of my strategies with the Monster deck (which is cool), but overall I think there is such depth to this that I was able to feel super smart figuring out card combos. As a somewhat casual player, maybe these types of combos existed before, so it was potentially the keywords making it more clear? Not sure.
Regardless, CDPR is totally heading in the right direction. I think this first release is a step in the right direction, and I'm going to be recommending it to my friends still. I can't wait to see how it changes throughout the beta and onto final release. I also hope they release their Win10 version soon (I've been playing on Xbox so really want the Play Anywhere functionality for my PC instead of having separate XBL and GOG accounts and progress).