WITCHER 1

just play it on the easiest difficulty get it over with. several parts of the game are slogs to play through.

You heard wrong.
It turns signs and alchemy to shit and if you are new the difficuly ramps up considerably since you don't know the mechanics well enough to counter it.

open uninstall.exe, thats the best mod you can use for this aged-like-milk game

Fuck off. If something doesn't work, you'll just try something else. Why does every game need to be stupid easy nowadays?

Besides, Witcher on hard is NOT hard. Especially after chapter 2 it'll get easy if you do all the side quests.

This is the ONLY mod you COULD install but don't have to:
moddb.com/mods/the-witcher-texturen-mod

other than that what this user said.

nothing makes the game fun, it's horrible janky yurotrash that gets dicklicked here by a bunch of 15 year olds desperately trying to be contrarine. the combat is horrible, the writing is horrible and nonsensical, with basically none of the established characters acting as they actually did in the books, the game design is bad and involves spending the vast majority of your time running back and forth across the same areas 10 times just to report meaningless updates to everyone. the plot in the first game is typical video game trash, and the only interesting quests are just badly done allegories or straight up ripoffs of things from the book series, and anytime you ask someone why the game is good they will dance around never answering or just repeating "muh atmosphere, muh comfy" because they know it's shit. For a better use of the 45 hours the game would take you, read the books, it's not only better written obviously, but it's more plot relevant to the rest of the games anyway.

Btw I hope you're not playing TW1 to prep for TW2 or TW3, because it barely has any relevance to those games.

>reading books to play video games
How pozzed do you have to be? Also the story and dialogue is unironically better than in TW3

Besides establish major characters and companions and events that are referenced in TW3?

Just play vanilla, it's fantastic on its own

are you having a stroke or sth, mr. ?

>Mods on first playthrough
Imbecile.

A genuine reply to this question, as I just played like 3 hours ago:
FPS Mod Counter
Perfect Blood
Perfect Rain
Realistic Moon
Better Dice
If you want, Geralt's face from W3 is a mod
Scabbard Mod
Sword Overhaul
Faster Movement
Plentiful Herbs
Fairer Trade
Han Gives Han NOT Berbercane
Dontforceminreqs Low Res Texture Fix

All of this if you want for a vanilla-esque first playthrough
Trust me it's great

Don't install Full Combat Rebalance for a first playthrough, it makes the game way too hard for a newcomer.

I'm playing it now after following this guide:
kirmiziperfect.com/installing-best-mods-for-the-witcher-1-guide/

Also using FCR. I didn't try vanilla because the combat is absolute trash in this game. With FCR, encounters last a more realistic amount of time. I picked Easy in the FCR install which is more like Nightmare difficulty. If you do FCR i'd go with Casual difficulty. On FCR-Easy I have to save before almost every enemy because if you miss 1 combo prompt you're toast.

As far as the graphics mods, here's my thoughts on that. The sword/armor and character mods are good. The environment mods are mostly just run through a sharpening filter and IMO look worse than normal. Nothing really is worse on the eyes than sharpening filters. I'm sure these modders may have deluded themselves into thinking "sharper" looking textures improves the graphics, but when geometry is this basic to begin with, sharpening is only going to make it look a lot worse.

Only other mod I installed that I liked is the HBAO mod.

Since I installed a bunch of huge packages I'm not sure where the biggested offenders are in the sharpened textures environment since some areas, like the swamp, actually look almost current gen. If anything maybe I'd skip the texturen mod since I'm pretty sure that is 100% just sharpened textures whereas the overhaul mod might have more legit textures.

>not modding the game with the worst combat system ever created by mankind
Imbecile

>worst combat system ever created by mankind
I take it you haven't played many games.

Just play it on the easiest difficulty available and enjoy everything except for the combat.