The Witcher

This is one of those rare circumstances where I could not complete the game out of sheer boredom and lack of clear direction. I was able to complete Deus Ex despite its terrible shortcomings mainly in combat, but this game somehow does combat worse than anything I have ever played.
It is unbelievably jank, and definitely a product of its time. Animations don't match up at all, instead you have to rely on the seemingly random numbers that pop up as you engage in "combat", and Geralt can randomly just flop to the floor if you don't watch the numbers carefully. Stuns are bad in most games, however this game has the worst iteration of stuns I have ever seen, making the stun duration so stupidly long that I'm forced to just watch the enemy wail on me because I missed an extremely jank dodge. Dodge mechanics in this game are also extremely bad. Having to rely on potions and oils sounds like it could be fun, but in reality it becomes a grind-fest for ingredients or a time sink for any fool who wants to learn all of the ins and outs of this otherwise shallow game. In fact, every single facet of this game's combat is notoriously and simply bad and contradicts everything about good game design.
As for the rest of the game, the story is cliché and predictable; the graphics similar to aged milk (not good even compared to other old games); NPCs being a complete joke; dialogue being a complete joke; the atmosphere being the best thing about the game. The atmosphere pretty much carries this game for the first 5 hours, in which case it starts to fall apart the more combat is forced. It's really a shame because I can say I definitely enjoyed the first 5 hours of the game with the whole Priest storyline - even if it is cheesy.
However just like with most old games, the middle section becomes an unbearable slog that only the most diehard of nostalgia-based gamers can put up with. The sheer amount of fetch quests and repetitive back-and-forth quests should be borderline illegal, it reminds me of Skyrim's terrible quests. Dialogue is also a huge issue as it feels extremely robotic and accidentally funny just because of the way the dialogue is written like you are supposed to take it seriously. Or NPCs like Shani's caretaker that have dialogue that is just infuriating and annoying considering you have to spam it just to get passed her... not fun. Another NPC I can think of such as the Gravedigger that straight up ignores you if you don't give him the specific type of alcohol (that you are just expected to know about) until you reload your save or leave/re-enter the area.
As for glitches and bugs, I was running a community patch so there wasn't that much but there were still a few that ruined any hopes of immersion. Regardless, bugs are somewhat expected in old games like this.
Overall, The Witcher 1 is, in my opinion, a completely unbearable game that I would never recommend to anyone regardless of their interest in the franchise. The combat is atrocious, the characters are completely asinine, the graphics are flat and lack style, and getting through the story is tedious at best. Skip this one, read the books or go to 2 or 3 if you want an actual Witcher experience.

Also, as a side note, gambling dice is so, so, SO much worse than Gwent it's not even funny. I could go on a rant about that for hours.

It's surprising to see how often the combat is mentioned as the only bad thing about this game. It is in fact pretty bad, but you get used to it. The problem in this is that it ignores everything else Witcher 1 can't do.
The AI sucks. Either you have escort missions, where they try to suicide and run into 5 monsters. Some characters change their dialogue options completely if you just reenter the house. So you might be like ah damn I can't do that, but in reality, you can easily do it by just going in again. NPC's start dialogue during fights AND YOU CAN DIE DURING THAT. Some important quest NPCs randomly disappear. And of course, the quest markers will show only where they are supposed to be, not where they are.
On the topic of quests and the map. The quests don't describe anything, so unless you randomly stumble upon important information you won't know what to do. And what definitely doesn't help is the number of quests you get. You get a quest, your search for info, you get more quests and you forget what you were supposed to do. And then you find out there are time-sensitive quests! So if you want to experience the game to its fullest you have to closely follow a guide, which I'm not going to do because why would I.
Just skip this game. There is no reason to play this, Play Witcher 2, it will save you time and money.

A game about a man with fabulous silky hair who goes around seducing females and collecting their nudes after sex. In between he walks around a giant swamp killing monster-like creatures with stylish swordsmanship and overall swag. I played half of the game without steam connection, the other half with. So probably 80 hours of fun, counting the time I spent with that awesome mini-game. Forget about Skyrim, do yourself a favor and get the 3 Witcher games.

I feel bad for everyone who ditched this game because of the combat, which takes no time to get used to if you bother trying. One of the best RPGs that kickstarted an excellent franchise. It's aged better than most make it out to be.

The funny story I have about Witcher is that 2 years ago I attempted to play the game, after hearing many good things about the series and Witcher 3 had just come out a few months prior so I decided to give this a go. At the time I didn't have the greatest PC, it was a computer I bought back in 2012 and it didn't have the greatest specs for gaming, at least games that came after roughly 2005. I think it only had a 2.6 GHZ processor and 4 GB of RAM and used one of those crappy integrated Intel graphics chips. I mean compared to the Laptop I have now which has a 3.8 GHZ processor, 16 GB of RAM, and a NVIDIA graphics card. Yeah I thought it would be smart to play Witcher on this old laptop and to be honest my laptop did have the specs to run the game, I was able to run the game on slightly lower settings and using a few tricks. So I played the game for about a week, and ended up getting to the 3rd chapter, so maybe about 20 hours into the game. I had been playing the game for about 4 or 5 hours straight that day and after I go into the town to explore things my computer suddenly shuts off. I try to reboot but it goes to a black startup screen and I take the hard drive out and its super hot, and I try to see if I can get another computer to read it, which doesn't work. So I then realize that the hard drive was overheated from the game.

So I had to go through a long process of getting the hard drive sent in to try to save my 500 GB of music and documents, ended up finding a new Laptop around the house with similar specs, and then I had to be careful which games I decided to play on the laptop. So 2 years later after that incident I got a better Laptop a few months back in January that can handle way better games, in fact it can handle modern games, and the hard drive isn't by the processor so it won't get over heated. So I decided just last month to pick try to finish the game up since I still had my old save files and want to finally get to Witcher 3, so I ended up getting to chapter 5 and then a glitch prevented me from obtaining the main quest so I had to use some guys file from online to finally beat the game legitimately. To be honest, this is probably the best and worst of RPGs put into one game. Lets get the bad out of the way, the combat is incredibly boring and tedious, its basically timed clicking on the enemies until they die and the next thing is the game throws so many items and potions and scrolls at you, and to be honest most of those are worthless, there are only 3 or 4 useful potions in the entire game, and I never even crafted more than a handful of potions in the game simply because I didn't need to. The other thing is that the side quests are really tedious and repetitive, they mostly come down to killing generic enemies, random fetch quests, and talking to random people. Now on the other hand you have the good, the story is pretty interesting and engaging, the characters, despite the awkward voice acting, are pretty complex and unique, the setting and atmosphere is solid (even if it is a little generic medieval), and you have the notorious sex scenes where you get a card of every women you sleep with in this game. But on the other hand the novelty does wear off once you've slept with over 50 women, I mean its just so funny that women throw themselves at Geralt like he's some sex God, some after only knowing him for a few minutes, and it does feel a bit forced and gimmicky.

So the thing about the first Witcher is its a mixed bag that once you can get through some of the tedium and repetition the game does have some interesting moments and a solid enough story, but the sequels would greatly improve on this.

I tried my best to play the first Witcher. I bought it as a bundle on Steam and I tried 3 times to play it from the start. I played around 8 hours in total and I just can't....

There's something odd with the first game, I don't know how to explain that. It just feel weird and I just can't make myself play through it.

People say that the second game is a leap in quality, I am hoping for that as I intend to play the second game.