I've been trying really hard to not pre-order the game, even if it's one of those games I know I'm going to love and will be well optimized and not buggy upon release.
If you can though I'd highly recommend playing at least The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, if for no other reason than it can help better prepare you for what to expect in The Witcher 3, as the games do not play like your typical western RPGs.
If Skyrim's world is like a cookie tray, vast yet shallow, The Witcher 2 is more like a casserole dish, not nearly as large in scale, but makes up for it in depth. The game channels a lot of intelligent discussion about real world events like race disparity and religion and doesn't hold your hand about what kind of decisions you make. It's not the Mass Effect thing where red dialogue choice = rogue and blue = paragon, you have to go to the effort of trying to see all sides of the problem and making your call from there, and even then it's not clear what the outcome will be. I remember in my first full playthrough I basically plowed my way through chapter 2 and ended up making decisions with no real context for what their consequences would be.
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