BOTW has the controls issue too, absolutely— its scheme is a bit of an oddball compared to other modern over-the-shoulder action adventure games, and that's made it hard for me to jump back in after a period of playing more conventional games like AC, Spider-Man, God of War, etc.

The story though? Lol, BOTW has none. You just show up and chase whatever catches your fancy while the princess hangs out at the castle doing all the work keeping the monster at bay.

I so wanted to like the Witcher, but the controls were absolutely nuts. Actually maybe not that bad (ahem, Outer Wilds). But for a casual gamer they were not intuitive and were extremely forgettable. Plus you couldn't easily go back to the little training dojo.

Good controls and quick review/tutorial seem to be overlooked opportunities for improvement that would dramatically lower the bar for casual gamers who want to play more games but quickly get frustrated by any kind of friction.

("Previously on" or self-evident state is increasingly dead even in TV/series so I guess it's not surprising it's disappearing from games too.)

Are you talking about The Witcher 1? That game had whack controls for sure, and all in all I'd say isn't worth playing.

TW2 and TW3 are some of my favourite games though and IMO had fairly straightforward controls. I do think I switched between playing with controller and keyboard + mouse though, so it may be worth trying controller in the 2nd/3rd games if you hadn't done that.

I played W1 and W3 several times and had no problems with the controls, but I was never able to accommodate with W2 controls, so I never played more than 15 minutes at a time, with many attempts. It was kb + mouse.