I heard that they planned to have decisions in this game actually effect choices and the path of the game down the road. Is it true, did they manage some level of open gaming, or did that go bust?

There are times when choices you make will come back to haunt you, for whatever reason. It's usually pretty easy to anticipate what will happen once you've played the game for a bit though.

Still, I certainly liked this method of decision-making over the usual "you gain 5 good/evil points".

They certainly managed it better than many games do. While the story is linear in that certain events will happen regardless and you'll go to them in the same order, often how you get to them, how others treat you and the outcome changes depending on choices you made much earlier in the game. There is no black or white here, there are only shades of grey (three, to be precise), and if you enjoy a good story you'll enjoy walking through The Witcher.

As a general overview (minor spoiler warning), there are two main opposing sides who each have their own ethical issues. Throughout the game you'll be given the choice of whether to help one of these sides, or stay neutral. Your decisions will affect how NPCs react to you later in the game, and while some decisions will have obvious ramifications, others won't show you the full consequences of your actions until much later. CD Project designed it this way so you couldn't simply load up a recent save and change your decision, and I think it works really well.

I really like the idea of a game where you can't just go back and load a save. It forces you to actually live with the decisions you made in the game and deal with the consequences, which are pretty cool.

Also happy that they opened it back the typical black and white prominently found in multi-ended games. After Fable, KotOR, Shadow Hearts and a dozen other games it'll be good to see it go back to the ways of just having choices effect the progress of the game to some degree.

Thanks for the responses, gentlemen!