I finished the game but wanted to check out the Skellige's Most Wanted DLC quest that just came out. Since there's no more story to recap, loading my save took a couple of seconds. Literally (running game from SSD). To think of the hours of my life wasted listening to the same story recaps, over and over and over and over and over and over, etc. Not to mention the few that lingered for maybe 30 seconds longer after the narration was over. Infuriating!

CDPR, with such attention to details and game design and the game being a masterpiece (with lots of annoyances, though), this was such a stupid feature. And most disappointing is that from day one people have been requesting that this feature be removed or changed so it only occurs during the first load of a savegame, but no. By the middle of my 139 or so hour investment into this game, I was screaming curses at your development team every time the story recap came up. Such a shame.

I loved the game and thank you for making it. I'm sorry though that so many, many annoyances marred the experience.

While I agree it can be annoying if you manually reload a lot, I'll gladly take this "problem" over the myriad issues from which so many other games suffer. I think it's a neat feature for those of us who don't have time to do long marathon sessions and thus play the game in small chunks over time. Also, you don't have to wait for each one to play out - I spam the spacebar a bit and am able to get in game before most are finished, and I don't even have an SSD.

Can it be annoying? Sure. But to say something like this has marred the overall experience of an otherwise great game seems a bit drastic to me; but, to each his own I guess.

I believe they are partially hiding loading going on in the background, having Dandelion talk rather than using a progress bar. However, it would be nice to have both, and when the game is ready have an option to skip the rest of the scene and get straight into the game. However my solution is to spam saves. If you die and instantly reload the last save then you don't get the story.

But you CAN skip the rest of the scene once it's done loading - I do it all the time. And back to OP's point, it can definitely get repetitive, but since it's partially skippable I don't have much of an issue with it. I'd much rather watch the story recaps than stare at a blank loading screen or watch the same still images recycle over and over.

Fair enough. It hasn't worked for me, but then maybe my computer is too slow to load before the monologue ends.

There's a mod for that!

It let's you disable Intros, stroy-recaps or both.
[url=]http://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/66/?[/url]

Video explain how to install; not very difficult though
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcqJZ8tlpsE