After I had read the two books, the Last Wish and the Sword of Destiny and played the Witcher 2 Assassin of the Kings, I decided to tackle the first Witcher game. After beating the game, I was happy that I decided to do so. The World in the first game has better feel to it, and the main and side stories are more like in the books.

However most of the changes they made for the Witcher 2, were for the better. You spend too much time on going from place to place searching for people that may or may not be there, depending on the time of the day. This is made worse by the fact that there is no easy way to pass time on most parts of the game. Combat system is far too simple for such a long game, and it provides most challenge in the beginning and ends being very easy in the end when Geralt is all level up.

Despite the its flaws, I whole sincerely recommended this dialogue heavy, time consuming dive into the world of the White Wolf.

After I had read the two books, the Last Wish and the Sword of Destiny and played the Witcher 2 Assassin of the Kings, I decided to tackle the first Witcher game. After beating the game, I was happy that I decided to do so. The World in the first game has better feel to it, and the main and side stories are more like in the books.

However most of the changes they made for the Witcher 2, were for the better. You spend too much time on going from place to place searching for people that may or may not be there, depending on the time of the day. This is made worse by the fact that there is no easy way to pass time on most parts of the game. Combat system is far too simple for such a long game, and it provides most challenge in the beginning and ends being very easy in the end when Geralt is all level up.

Despite the its flaws, I whole sincerely recommended this dialogue heavy, time consuming dive into the world of the White Wolf.

I like what I've played of, but what I've played of The Witcher 2 seems much better. It seems like it has less "fluff", less stuff that doesn't make sense like "you have to meditate in front of a fire". I guess that makes sense from a narrative perspective, but when it comes to gameplay and you're in a game where certain things have to happen at certain times, it's annoying to walk across this huge area, find out you have to wait 12 hours, and then go find someplace to meditate.

But I would still like to beat it someday.

I was never a huge fan of the combat in the first game, but it's still a pretty interesting game. My experience with it is a bit colored by the constant (I'm talking at least once an hour) crashes to desktop I got when playing two years ago. It was super frustrating and almost made me not finish it.

@believer258 said:

I like what I've played of, but what I've played of The Witcher 2 seems much better. It seems like it has less "fluff", less stuff that doesn't make sense like "you have to meditate in front of a fire". I guess that makes sense from a narrative perspective, but when it comes to gameplay and you're in a game where certain things have to happen at certain times, it's annoying to walk across this huge area, find out you have to wait 12 hours, and then go find someplace to meditate.

But I would still like to beat it someday.

I recommend that you finish the first game. The ending is actually quite good and pushes story of the first game past the second one. And yes, Witcher 2 is better game, it was so good that it made me by video card so I could run the first game. It is quite frustrating to run long distances (in the first Witcher) to a place, only to find out that character you are looking for is no longer even in the same map. So much so, that at last half of the game, I used the guide that came with the game to verify where people where before taking a long journey there (guide has nice maps that show where they are located).

@wemibelec90

I played the enhanced edition and it glitched only two or three times, but never crashed.

It is an amazing game I feel is worth experiencing. I was actually sad when it ended because no matter how strange some of it was it was addicting and the world, as you said ,felt amazing.

I love The Witcher and I played almost 30 hours of it in just a couple of days. I never finished it though because I got stuck at the Azar Javed fight. I do want to finish it but I know I will never get through that boss fight. The world and tone of the game is fantastic and I loved just about everything about it except for the combat, which works, but isn't all that great.

The ending of that first game is pretty fucking good though, huh?

I wish they would hurry up and translate the other books into English.

Yeah, this is basically what I said when I finished the game a few months ago. It takes a while to get going, but once you're around halfway through Act 2 everything starts clicking and the story becomes interesting. Have yet to get past the first few hours of TW2 though, mostly because I don't have that kind of time right now.

I actually much preferred the first game to the sequel and consider it to be a better game. Meditation spots are easy to find, and for me the inconvenience of having to find a fire wasn't close to the inconvenience of having my potion consumption restricted to meditation times. I prefer the way the combat is not about action-orientated twitch controls where the focus is simply avoiding taking a hit, as in the sequel. Story-wise, I just felt much more involved; the world felt more like a living breathing thing and I felt more connection to the characters and the antagonists. TW1 had pacing issues (ie. too much time spent in the fucking horrible swamp) but I felt they were dwarfed by the pacing issues of TW2 (only 4 chapters, with a drawn out beginning and rushed ending, where the skill tree only really matters past the halfway point of the game). Also in the first game there are several minor moral choices which had a big emotional impact on me - I still feel bad about Abigail and the Outskirts even though I've played through it BOTH ways - while in TW2 there is only really one big choice that matters: Iorveth or Roche.

That's not to say I think TW2 is a bad game by any means. I enjoyed it a lot. However I felt there was something important missing from it and I completely lost momentum on my second play through. Compared to the amount of praise and hype that TW2 generated, I don't think the The Witcher(1) gets nearly enough credit.