As someone who is completely new to the series (I somehow had never even heard of The Witcher series before I heard of The Witcher 3), I was honestly confused at the start, and it forced me to read up on the backstory to get the full experience.
The basic main story of The Witcher 3 in particular is easy to follow, and you don't need to know anything about the previous games to follow along with it, but the game just throws a ton of backstory at you as well (referencing different names and political intrigue mostly) that I had absolutely no context for. There are characters that show up that Geralt knows from previous games as well (even outside of the ones originally listed in the glossary), where Geralt just launches into conversations with them without you knowing what's going on.
Luckily, the glossaries they have are extremely detailed and update frequently with both new characters and new info on existing characters, depending on what you do in the story.
This game is an absolute behemoth though. It's very impressive. Like, all of the side quests I've done feel unique and worthwhile, and the way the story branches off in multiple different ways even within the same quest is awesome. The attention to detail for character development is quite noticeable as well.
I'm ~25 hours in and haven't even remotely scratched the surface of this game yet. I spent a ton of time in the tutorial area, and have only really done main quest stuff in the first major town you come across, only taking the odd side quest around that area. I just traveled to the first main city for the purposes of the main story, which was even more impressive. Meanwhile the game is just dropping little nuggets of intrigue by having characters just reference different things like the main city in the game, and a legendary monster on the islands way out to the West that I'd have to kill to get a certain set of armor (which I'm nowhere near the recommended level for yet). The sense of scale is really something.
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