Witchers' siver swords does have steel cores, it is also mentioned in the first game by Zoltan when you take him Coen(may he rests in peace)'s silver sword but not all silver swords are witchers' silver swords and we can not be sure if other silver swords also have the steel core or not, especially after the Dwarven blacksmith's apprentice in vergen mentions that not everybody can make a silversword and not many among those who are able to do one can make a decent one. About the damage dealt, you can kill even the large monsters like bullvore with a hammer(not talking about dwarven warhammer, talking about the hammer which deals 2-4 damage) and can kill even the toughest humans, even when they are in groups, with silver swords.

I don't mind that but surely they take some damage. At least in W1 they do.. Well, You swing and miss a lot but I think they do take a bit damage. In 2, well haven't tried. Just in prologue to get the new feeling, and checking how it works, 'cos it's different.
It was nice though to see a drowner in that well. And I noticed that geralt this time occasionally says some slogans.

Edit: and when I realised that you can throw people of the roof or stairs with aard. And the axii sign hopefully implemented well in dialogue. Well, It felt a bit jedi thing. Well, both good.

There's also one thing. It seems that fantasy writers don't know jack shit about metalurgy. Due to the softness of silver it would be impossible to sharpen it to a point where it would be able to penetrate any harder objecs. It propably would have problems with cutting into a strong leather jacket. And even if it did it would need sharpening afterwards. (the shaprpest knives are diamond coated, the hardest mineral on our planet)
Assuming of course that we're talking about 0.925 silver, which is commonly used and very soft. To make it any harder it woud have to be melted with palladium or other hard metals, to make alloy in 50:50 proportions which would be economically unjustified

Aerondight worked just fine against everything. Wonder what the specs would be inW2?

I use silver swords against humans all the time.
Well, one particular silver sword.

Sure, it does crappy damage, but I don't draw that sword for stabbing ... it's all about the robust blue meteorite sword + 2 moon runes, and sign use.
I'll do the occasional attack to finish enemies off or to get the last bits of adrenaline I need to heliotrope but by and large the boost to sign damage makes it the more efficient weapon for a magic build in chapter 2.

I don't think anyone is questioning whether or not silver is a soft metal. I'm pretty sure everyone knows that.

The problem is he hacks and cuts away with his silver sword against beasts that he can later make very tough armor from their skins (kayren, etc.) He also fights things like endregas and arachas that have obviously tough shells. And he's definitely going to be hacking bone with most of the monsters he faces. So the soft metal explanation doesn't wash.

http://witcher.wikia.com/wiki/Aerondight

It is not bad but i prefer Moonblade, it works fine till the start of chapter 3 if you put a few decent runes in(i go with a sun, a fire and a ysgith rune)

As the info in my previous post, they are silver-plated steel swords, not swords made of silver. And the reason of using a silver sword is monsters are weak against silver.

Plus, at the end of TW1, Geralt used the silver sword too...
SPOILER for TW1









finish off the Grand Master, who was human.

I considered this problem early on in Witcher 1. I think what it is is the fact that the steel one has more of a crushing value as it has more weight. Some early medieval swords were more likely to crush your skull than they were to slice it off. At one point in the game during a particular cutscene you see where Geralt hit one of the enemies and the skull is crushed rather than cut. For humans this would spell more problems than if simply a clean cut since those can be stitched together, but if your arm/wrist/ribs/legs are broken from the strike it'll take much longer to heal and you're going to be hurting a lot more than just a simple slice.

When you use a group finisher in TW2 then in one of them Geralt sticks his steel sword in one enemy, takes his silver sword to cut down another and then pulls out the steel sword and kills the third one with both. Also, at the end of TW1 Geralt kills the Grandmaster with silver sword. So silver one is definitely usable and used against humans, it's simply not the most effective tool for the job.

Edit: Eh, Orion beat me to it. ;)

Yes, I know that. I'm not in any way confused about that point.

What I'm pointing out is people are saying the silver sword is delicate and that's why you don't use it against humans. I say that explanation doesn't wash because some of the monsters Geralt fights are far tougher than humans in armor.

you could use a knife and an hammer to open a can, but it's better a tin-opener.

In the game you could do damage against human with silver swords, it's just less effective then a steel sword

For your question, remember that geralt in game uses only leather/mail armor, not plate armor. As a witcher he's never HEAVY armored, so probably much of the monster parts are not harder than plate armor.
We should consider also that monster's carapace etc are still LIVING PARTS of the monster, so very susceptible to silver, remember for example the tendency of silversword to incinerate monster (as a sort of magical reaction to silver).

Practically, in the writer imagination, Silver is naturally tender against other steel and other metals but, for "magical" reasons is "stronger" agains monster.

It is about efficiency but there a cool and crazy guy around here that goes killing everything on Insane difficulty with a Pickaxe or a Shovel.

So you can use anything against anything, just don't expect the same damage result but you still can win!

I'm gonna make a Insane Broom playthrough when I finish my current one as tribute to that pickaxe/shovel guy!

Pickaxe and Shovel boss fights:

http://www.youtube.com/user/TheKyozo