Gies actually says
"The Witcher 3's expanded cast of characters doesn't preclude more screen time for just about everyone, and CD Projekt has done work to make for more interesting, influential women that feel just a bit more fleshed out than they've been previously. This includes a number of powerful women with complicated motivations and goals of their own.

That said, the world CD Projekt has created is oppressively misogynist. In some ways, the game deals directly with this — characters acknowledge again and again that it's hard to be a woman there, that it's a place of violence and terror and that women must work harder to be recognized and respected."

Believe it or not, I don't believe that the line "the world CD Projekt has created is oppressively misogynist" (wait, shouldn't that be 'misogynistic'? anyway...) is actually criticism I believe it is descriptive. As the Forbes article points out presenting a fantasy world as 'oppressively misogynistic' isn't, in itself, necessarily a bad thing if your piece is ABOUT oppressively misogynistic world what you SAY about them doesn't have to be misogynistic itself
Like 1984 presents a world that is oppressively totalitarian without telling a story that is somehow pro-totalitarianism, quite the opposite in fact

It's not until the next paragraph that Gies criticism actually begins, where he gets onto what he seems to feel is torture porn, attire etc. and raises concerns about the story that is told within that oppressively misogynistic world

IMO

But yeah, Anita and McIntosh are being knee-jerk and attention seeking by the sound of it, I'll give you that...

And you think you know better what he is thinking?
As I said, his criticisms seem cherry-picked and dishonest. He takes isolated incidents out of context and uses them to call the game "misogynistic". Whether he believes it or not, he is failing to even try to be objective. He certainly isn't putting his prejudices aside.

It seems pretty damn obvious he's doing it for the clicks. Thought police? Get fucking real...
Its pretty damn obvious he's going out of his way to create controversy.

Why the heck do you keep coming back to repeat the same damn things, multiple posts every day with nothing useful to add? That's the very definition of trolling...

You call it hypocritical of the game to have one NPC come off as a bit sexist in an "oppressively misogynist" world that you are now trying to claim might be just a description? The fact one PC says that means every character in the game should be equally sexist or the game is hypocritical? You make no sense...

You are really grasping at straws in your desperate attempt to defend this moron...

I must admit that I found that slightly cryptic myself. The best I could come up with is that cRPGs tend to allow you to role-play 'evil' but because The Witchers' morality system is more nuanced and ambiguous than simple positive and negative 'karma' points or whatever, which is usually one of its strengths, but here maybe the fear is that someone with a world view who would sympathise with a wife beater in real life would not realise that the sympathetic conversation choice is supposed to be the 'evil' one and would serve to reinforce that skewed world-view?

Dunno, that's my theory, Gies HAS left a few blanks to fill in there, I'll admit that

I never lost sight of the fact that it was one 5 minute conversation tree he decided he had an issue in a 70hr game that he also heaps a lot of praise on and awards 8/10 though

As for that quote, the take home message for me from it, and the review as a whole was 'It's like Game of Thrones'
*shrugs* I like Game of Thrones - I played through the cRPG and thought it deserved far more than the 65% or whatever metascore it has

If The Witcher 3 ISN'T like Game of Thrones and is actually much tamer then, yes, there's maybe something fundamentally wrong with the review if it IS like GoT then.. what can I say? That's the impression I got from the review...

Are you talking about what I said to Shadowstalker?
No What I said was it makes no sense for a soldier to berate a woman for dressing a certain way when every woman in the game world dresses that way because that mode of dress would be 'normal' to him - That's what I believe Gias is saying, there's no hypocrisy in that statement.

And I'm more trying to explain how my reading of the review seems to differ from yours than anything else but, hey, as well as it being impossible to write an objective review maybe it's also impossible to READ one objectively also!

It isn't the "evil" one, though. Showing pity for the character's situation isn't endorsement of his actions, and you can outright call him a monster despite the context he provides. Meanwhile, the reviewer clearly failed to explore the game enough to know that what he claimed isn't true. Slight spoiler: the beating isn't the cause of the miscarriage, or at the very least not the sole cause. That he doesn't know this proves that he's either an incompetent reviewer, a blazing ideologue enjoying a nice tall glass of confirmation bias, or both.

The Cyanide one, right? I really liked that one. Combat and graphics were a bit rough at times, but it really captured the feel of the show. Criminally underrated.

I think people just got depressed since 3 out of the 4 endings are emotionally devastating.

But "every" woman doesn't dress that way in the game. Gies exaggerated, again...and again why does this issue consume a full third of the review? Whereas somehow as review editor GTA V can get a 9.5. Diablo 3 a perfect 10; the expansion 9.5; Mass Effect 3 a perfect 10; Bioshocj Infinite perfect 10; Gone Home perfect 10; Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft perfect 10; Halo 4 9.5; Dead Space 3 9.5; Dragon Age Inquisition 9.5; Divinity Original Sin 9.5; WoW: Warlords of Draenor 9.5; Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor 9.5; Towerfall Ascension 9.5; Tales from Space: Mutant Blobs Attack 9. But you are calling an 8 such a great rating...

See I don't mind if you blast him for being "a blazing ideologue enjoying a nice tall glass of confirmation bias" as you put it - That's valid enough opinion of him, probably. That's maybe who he is and maybe his reviews reflect that, I just don't think there's anything particularly dishonest or unethical about that if he's being true to himself.

At the end of the day Polygon is a commercial venture, if Gies and his team find an audience for their views Polygon will success and if they don't it will fail (or start to fail and decide to re-staff PDQ)
But if there IS an audience for reviews like these then, if not Polygon, then SOMEONE will cater to it - that's just market forces!.

Yeah - the Cyanide game, the combat was a bit bizarre - trying to be Infinity Engine and Final Fantasy at the same time and it didn't really work THAT great but well enough to keep the good story flowing to the end. The stealth kills with Mors' dog were quite good fun though

Would there be nothing wrong with a reviewer claiming that Mario lets you kill hookers, then? Obviously that's an extreme example to illustrate the point, that being that you don't get to call yourself a journalist and get off with a "that's just like, my opinion, man" defense when you state something factually inaccurate and misrepresent what you're covering as a result.

And what's money got to do with it? If they want to make money by pandering to the thoughtcrimes demographic, then they can go right ahead. They just don't get to call what they're doing journalism at the same time, same way people who work in sewage plants don't get to call themselves chefs.

I was talking about reviews being targeted at a specific niche audience with a particular mindset rather than the 'Gaming Mainstream'. If they cultivate an audience who will honestly react to Witcher 3 in the same was that Gies has then they are fulfilling a role and serving that niche audience well.

Whether Gies is not just placing particular emphasis on aspects that are going have particular relevance to his intended audience and their sensibilities and actively 'lying though his teeth'... well I'm treading on thin 'I haven't played the game' ice but, for me, there's no 'smoking gun' of dishonesty...

You are just trolling. Hang it up. For a reviewer who supposedly played the game, he sure seems to find ways to misrepresent the game.

My understanding of Polygon's rating system is the number is derived by the staff no matter who reviews a particular game. GTA V gets a 9.5 because it is light-hearted satire; Witcher 3 an 8 because it is "oppressively misogynistic". One of the two games actually seriously explores racism and sexism in the world. Why is that one rated so much lower?

But you don't see anything that is dishonest or clickbaity? Like I said, quit trolling. You seem to just be here to argue. Two posts ago you claim its okay for him to say anything for commercialism, now you say he didn't exaggerate at all. Your argument changes by the post to whatever is opposite what people here are saying. This equals troll...

No I never said that Gies isn't being honest and true in his opinions, what I meant was, in employing someone with views as extreme as his as their reviews editor Polygon must be making a conscious decision for their audience to be more niche and less mainstream than the majority of sites and if that niche exists then, if not Polygon then someone will fill it

I also don't think it's fair to assume that Witcher 3 lost all of the 2 points that it's shy of a perfect score just based on gender politics, while the other 2/3 of the review is generally very positive there are defiantly some quibbles in there:

"However, as the game goes on, monster contracts, and admittedly, side quests in general start to bleed together. Objectives in the middle third of the game feel more and more like running from one point to another to try to advance dialogue sequences, which is made more frustrating than it needs to be by an overly restrictive fast-travel system. Fast travel can only be activated at signposts, or, while on a boat, to various harbors throughout the world, and signposts can be pretty far apart. The Witcher 3's world is worth exploring without the artificial enforcement of extended runs whether on foot, horseback or boat"

There's also stuff about the combat being disappointingly simplified from Witcher 2, the camera being 'terrible indoors'

And then there's the end game:

"Meanwhile, the final hours lose the open aspect the game spends so much time cultivating, instead devolving into a series of not-particularly-interesting boss fights that range from laughably easy to unfair in their sharp spikes in difficulty. These are punctuated by even more egregious, strangely distracting jaunts from points A to B to C and so on."

or are these exaggerations and lies too?

There is something that might interest you related to these corrupt SJWs. GOG refused to sell Hatred, according to the game developers behind Hatred, GOG told them the game was good, but “They can’t sell it”. And you might wonder why would that be possible? There is a simple explanation. SJWs managed to grab GOG by the balls, they can’t prevent GOG from releasing their own “problematic” games such as The Witcher 3. But I am damn sure they could do anything to prevent GOG from releasing a game they don’t like, and due to Hatred’s controversial status it was a sitting duck. I bet it could be Fish or some other indie corrupt who told GOG “If you sell that game we pull our games from your catalog”. The censorship is real people. We must act before it spreads and we must push back.

Maybe you already knew about what happened with GOG and Hatred, I mean, it happened a week ago. But that just means they already managed to censor one game. As a gamer loyal to GOG, and reluctant to move to Steam after the mods scandal, This affects me as well as many others like me directly. I wish there was some way to save GOG before it starts caving in to SJWs again.

How about the number of perfect 10's and 9.5's? Those are all perfect games without issues at all? 1 point less than Mutant Blobs: Tales from Space? Dragon Age: Inquisition near perfect score. C'mon...get real. We know why they dropped the score, its the "oppresive misogyny"...

You either like to disagree to disagree or you've really drunk the SJW Kool-aid...

I haven't looked into this in detail, but the fact that they said "can't" leads me to the conclusion that it has to do with the adult's only rating that Hatred got handed by the ESRB. If the game deserved that rating is another issue. I'm guessing that GOG is just doing what Steam is doing and avoiding adult's only content due to the various laws around the world. Some countries have quite harsh laws around adult content.