While The Witcher 2 thankfully massively improves on the combat system from the first game, as well as just having enormously improved production quality in all areas, it also is in my opinion an unfortunate relic of its time just the same. The introduction before you're finally let off the leash echoes the trends of the era it was released in, where to be a big, serious, modern title games needed to try to shoehorn in cinematic, "interactive" experiences to go for a larger-than-life presentation. The execution on that was often not great, and that's the case here, too.

The good news is that this game was enormously improved upon in the following title while keeping much of the soul that CDPR already had down.

Witcher 2's impressive graphics will absolutely ensure that it stands the test of time far longer than the first one, it still looks great to this day. Really impressive what they were able to do with this.