In another, a character who admitted to beating his wife so badly she miscarried is given an opportunity to explain why she had it coming, complete with a sympathetic conversation response option to go with it. The performances all around in this scene are excellent, the presentation among the best, most reined in anywhere in the game, but the message I saw it conveying was abhorrent.

I get that the setting of The Witcher 3 is meant to be a dark, dirty fantasy. But in a world that so explicitly goes out of its way to build a believable, distinctive take on the genre, the inclusion of so much violence explicitly directed against women feels like a clear, disconcerting choice. It's not just present, it's frequently a focus.
When they're not being murdered, women in The Witcher 3 are comically sexualized. Nudity is everywhere — think Game of Thrones on HBO — and even when they're dressed, female leads don't have it much better. One character, the subject of an extended series of side quests and whom plays a fairly important role in advancing the story wears a dress with a neckline so wide I was pretty sure I was seeing an areola every time she turned to the side (no, seriously).

Other moments are truly worthy of eye-rolling — as when one male character criticizes a woman for going into battle with her shirt hanging open, which is really the snake eating its own tail of video game sexism in a game where a significant portion of its speaking female characters are similarly and impractically exposed. Even Ciri, a daughter figure for Geralt and someone revealed to be incredibly powerful in her own right, walks around with her shirt unbuttoned in the middle, with a pretty clear view of a bra underneath — even when her attire changes to feature a fur-lined collar in colder climates.

Also, while I did not by any means see every city, burg and outpost in The Witcher 3's world in my 70+ hours spent within it, I don't recall a single non-white humanoid anywhere — not in Skellige, Novograd, Oxenfurt or anywhere else. Once I realized this I couldn't stop looking for any example of a person of color anywhere, and I never found it, unless you count naked monster women sitting at the feet of a boss like a slightly more awkward tribute to a Frank Frazetta painting. But maybe they're in there, somewhere.