It's been quite a few years since I played this game. I decided to replay it for several reasons, chief among them being I saw Kaer Morhen in TW3 and got nostalgic. That made me realize that my saves were gone because my hard drive crashed some time ago, so I decided I was going to reset myself up for TW3 by playing through the prior two games as I did the first time. I wanted to share some thoughts about my experience going back to this game and see how others may remember it or are feeling for the first time.

Storyline Dissonance

One of my chief concerns in returning to this game was how different I remember it being from TW2. TW1 had some wacky themes and really fanciful stuff going on. However, the only major difference between the two games that I felt was that TW1 did things more suddenly. Many time you would open a door and a new quest thing would pop up, and that sort of killed some of the nice easy-going feel that the games had.

Really though, there's not that much difference from stomping around with The Lady of the Lake and Druids as there is to dealing with talking trolls and succubi. Things really felt a lot better now that I've got TW2 in my mind, and I definitely encourage people to replay it if they think that's a barrier, even though TW2 is more "gritty".

Both games though suffer from what I call "turning over two pages at once" syndrome. Geralt will suddenly have knowledge you yourself haven't acquired, even though a lot of the games spend time to laboriously explain things. This works a bit later in the games where you can believe Geralt is recovering a bit of memory (remembering how to deal with a striga, for instance) but there's some parts where no reading between the lines will illuminate anything. It's a regular dissonance that often leaves me confused on how he came to that conclusion. Most of the game though is good at explaining itself, and most of it remains convincing, save for time-travel.

The Fancy Combat

I still believe that TW1's combat is pretty great, and I would love to see the system used to make auto-attacking in other RPGs more engaging. However, that's what a lot of it feels like, auto-attacking. Things get so out of your hands and you are begging that monsters can;t attack fast enough to kill you. Even though I can land chain after chain, giant centipedes kill me instantly because they have completely guaranteed amount of hits with massive damage. Signs are completely ineffective in TW1, save for Aard and occasionally Igni, the latter mostly for exploding enemies.

Both games have too much RNG to be completely fair. Grinding one's head up against a wall because you need to preserve your potions gets quite tiresome, and it really draws the game to a complete halt when you're hoping and praying for proper positioning above all else. Regardless though I still get into that rhythm whenever a truly tough fight starts and I remember how it suits the pace of the game. Whenever a calm fight rolls in I can parallel it to the feeling of running across big empty fields.

So combat is about as I remember it. I played it on hard mode this time and nothing really changed save for the amount of RNG popping up. Definitely recommend hard since the sword swish fits better with the environment. Always get Aard stun though.

The World

I remember running through wheat fields for the first time in Chapter I and going "Wow, this game is really something special", before running into a fence and feeling dumb. That first bit of freedom though preps you for Chapter IV, where you gallop through fields of tall grass and get completely lost in the land with three rather open, interconnected areas. This gave reveals itself to you in a wonderful way, and I felt completely drawn in by its environments.

Vizima remains one of the best cities portrayed in a fantasy game. There are just enough people to make things feel lively, they say just enough diverse things to make running through the streets always entertaining, and there's just enough doors to make it feel lived in. Just enough, and that's more than enough by my standing. I'm sure we all know how empty places in Skyrim feel, especially by comparison. This game was about scale, and it did so beautifully.

The art was a contributing factor, of course. Despite the repetition there were some great character designs, stunning fanciful environments, and generally great feel all around. Every place feels distinct and I instantly acclimated to places again, once I had a once-around.

Colorful Cast

This series definitely knows how to portray its characters. It's not even the moral angle that makes them so endearing, but their interconnected nature even if the story sort of goes a bit wonky trying to explain those connections. I have a feeling if I really broke it down I would get really frustrated at the lack of development these guys have, how shallow their goals might seem, but I honestly just feel good when I speak with them. The actors and the writing lets off this great vibe that absorbs me totally.

I wish there was a little bit more to Alvin that would perhaps have hinted better at him basically going mad. I wish Zoltan showed up a bit more, and the Witchers too. I wish Shani had a bit more of a purpose. I wish Thaler would swear at me some more. These are good things to wish for though, and I think shows the presence of strong material.

Extra Modules

I only finished the two "official" ones either due to bugs or getting completely frustrated and bored with the others. I really wanted to finish "The Wedding" but it broke on me at one point and I just got fed up. I'm really surprised that CDPR actually decided to release these in a full retail box version of the game. Personally, I only think one or two do anything really special. It has nothing to do with voice acting and polish and everything to do with providing and interesting experience which is beyond "do some more quests as Geralt". I'm not sure it really paid off.

The two official ones are nice though. I like the idea of telling stories where Geralt is presumed to have some greater knowledge of the world. Great ideas for expansions upon the book narrative. The Price of Neutrality is pretty good, though the additional quests are quite superfluous. That tends to be a problem with these, that they expect you to do some grinding (especially on higher difficulties) for essentially no reward. The other one is very much busy work, but at least it was tightly constructed. I liked hearing the dialogue, taking on new challenges. They were nice additions. Wish a couple had been made with TW2.

The Witcher: Rise of the White Wolf and The Witcher 2 Alpha

Probably the most disappointing aspect of the wait in between the first and second game was the promise of a remake in the form of The Witcher: Rise of the White Wolf. Using their non famous graphical wow-ing, CDPR sought to double up on the Enhanced Edition and bring the game to consoles. Unfortunately, that's all we even know about it, since the project was promptly shelved. I would absolutely love to talk to someone in CDPR about the potential changes the game would have had, and I hope that maybe TW3 modding community might take up a small scale effort of this kind.

We do, however, get a sense of what the game might have entailed in The Witcher 2's leaked alpha demonstration. Some of the more interesting aspects from this early stage in development is the return of TW1 combat system combined with cinematic boss dialog and heavier use of QTEs. While the latter is a poison for me, the former might have been interesting as a way to build character in the way that Deus Ex: Human Revolution did its dialog boss fights. Sad to know that TW1 could have had a new perspective put on it with time, but didn't.

Act by Act

Lastly I wanted to give some overall thoughts per chapter to explain what the experience meant to me overall. I'll try and sum up some of the more stand-out points.

The prologue is interestingly effective of getting you to care about all the Witchers at Kaer Morhen.... Except the one who dies. I can't even remember his name anymore because he was so unmemorable. They get you really attached that you're sad to see them all drift away before you actually get to know them that much. It's a good set-up.

Chapter I is perhaps the most out-of-place one in the whole game, but it provides a very nice decision to make and a sense of freedom before you're forced to learn one specific area more thoroughly. There's plenty of hidden content to explore with the day and night cycles running, side quests to start (I actually did dice poker and fist fighting for real this time around, didn't even touch them before), and a good conclusion which resets things again.

Chapter II is a mostly slow chapter, but not at all uneventful. You spend most of it talking with people, not fighting monsters. While the mystery business can get very laborious, it's always nice to sit down and talk with some of these great characters. Wandering Vizima and seeing the actual politics play out is really great, and you get a sense of comfort just in time to have it yanked away. To say something about the swamp... It's big, but it constricts you way too much. I get more frustrated than not traveling around there. Got some good combat when you're not dealing with the plant-things.

Chapter III delves more heavily into the political side and is a bit shorter, sense it focuses around bigger moments. I got stuck for a little bit in this chapter until I triggered the bank robbery, in which I actually helped the Scoia'tel this time around. No idea why I sided with the Order on my first playthrough. It doesn't matter so much, but it does seem momentus, especially since you get to wrap up a bit of business by the end, though that concludes with an under-utilized gimmick of "collapsing caves". Really wish they would use Signs more effectively in this series.

Despite being almost completely detached from the main narrative and seeming to exist as a sort of concession to the books, I think Chapter IV of TW1 is the strongest in the whole narrative arc. Why? Because it allows the player to breathe and evaluate on things happening. It puts a rather straightforward fetch quest in the way while they're allowed to make decisions and judge people according to their own ideals. It allows you once again to pursue the neutral path whilst evaluating the consequences, and provides a sense of adventure with a "natural environment" for Geralt. It just feels so right, and I have great memories from my playthroughs of the vodyanoi, Berengar, and wanting Alvin to leave me the hell alone.

Chapter V is a nice conclusion to things. It gives you a chance to recreate events from the book with the striga fight and allows you decide the fate of things, even though everything gets burned down. If there's one thing I don't like about the choice and conclusions narrative, it's how eager they are to "burn everything down" at the end of an Act so that things are finalized. It's just dumb after a while. Anyways, even though getting to and facing Javed is the RNG gods' choosing, the fight with the Grand Master is well deserved and presents the choices in a way which truly made me qustion actions throughout the game. I wish that TW2 had this level of finality, since TW3 apparently drops the ball severely on a lot of really big choices. The Epilogue is nothing so I won't talk about it.

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So there's my head, spilled out before you. TW2 was the first game I really started writing about in some serious critical depth because I really love the charm of this series way more than the twisted morality or big budgets (for indys). It uses Tolkienesque mythology in ways that I absolutely adore, and the games are so much different than your Baldur's Gates or Elder Scrolls'. I love the feel of TW1 and 2. They make me happy in ways I can't quite explain. They have this pacing which is leisurely and a mythology which supports it, one of the primary reasons I was also so disappointed with Act 3 of TW2.

I hope that CDPR will carry this ideal over to their future projects, since the saga has ended on the traditional Witcher story. This game is still great and I wish I was more easily able to share it with people without getting others turned off by its dated nature. The animations get pretty bad at times, and bugs galore pilfer it in and out, and that makes it not very conducive to watching. One has to play this game to get it, and it doesn't take "dozens of hours" like lackluster RPGs to get into. It's a grand game with an incredible spirit, and I still love it.

Nice write-ups.

Since you mentioned them, I want to recommend some TW1 fan modules to you.

Medical Problems 1 & 2. Two separate downloads but one long story. They serve as something of an unofficial extra epilogue to the first game.

The Crossroads

And a Curse, and Love, and Betrayal

Evil Decision

Those are my top 5 picks. Really quality content.

Honorable mentions would be Merry Witchmas, Entrapped, Wraiths of Quiet Hamlet.

I wrote up very brief reviews of all 21 fan adventures here. Though the other 13 not listed above could safely be ignored, unless you just get on a kick like I did.

Since you mentioned the books, I figured I'd point out that The Price of Neutrality is a retelling of Sapkowski's short story "The Lesser Evil", which appeared in The Last Wish. A lot is changed, including the setting and many characters, but the core story (or at least the premise) is the same.