Yes, but you are free to skip it if it fails to pique your interest. I've found the time wasted traveling, loads and loads of loading, and the massive save file sizes to be somewhat obnoxious, but the setting is interesting and the quests are sort of fun.

Witcher series in general is bad. Don't worth with them.

Why is that an option? :P

Play.

Dude, I just wanted to ask this :)

Yeah, The Witcher 1 hasn't aged very well and definitely requires a lot of patience, I almost dropped it too.

The Witcher 2 is a lot better, but has annoyances too.

YESYESYESYESYESYESYESYESYES

Yes. Its gameplay, story, character development(it IS there), sidequest quantities, and many other qualities I can't think of right now are just... Superb. As many have said before me, it IS slow-paced but you should be taking your time with the game itself anyways. It is a very long game. One playthrough had me at 41 hours. For one game, that is over-the-top for me, I'm not sure how it works out for others but the game is definitely worth your time if you can steady your pacing and not rush it, otherwise it feels slow.

Please don't kill me but I don't like Witcher series. First one is just plain boring and second one has the most repetitive combat I've ever seen, also has a bad skill build/usage IMO.
As I said before, please don't kill me.

I disliked The Witcher very much, and wouldn't play any other Witcher games for that reason. But it seems I'm part of the very rare minority who dislike The Witcher... So there's that.

for me witcher 1 is much better than the second one, and both are better than most games I've played

As far as I know, they have a continuous story and you can even import your character from 1 to 2, so yeah...don't skip a chapter.

Are you playing the enhanced edition? It had a lot of lines rewritten and tons of other stuff reworked/fixed and made for much better experience.
Otherwise definite yes, you should play it, finish it, and continue with your save in the next game. =)

Graphically the game has aged pretty badly and combat gets repetitive fast, but that story is the real star.

It is worth it. Still, reading the book is not less fun :D

Is witcher worth playing? You might as well be asking if life is worth living. So yea try it's a nice game for it's time.

Geralt becomes too strong on 1, and you'll have to walk A LOT, so it got more boring than exciting imho. At least for me, the final boss was real easy.

The Witcher 2 seem to look better in those aspects, but I didn't finish it yet.

So I think for the first one try and skip the side quests and it might be nice. :)

Read the books. Play witcher 1. Beat it. Import the save into witcher 2. Beat it. Fake your death in time for Witcher 3.

Yes its worth playing IMO. But... if you do get bored, dont feel too awful about skipping to the second. Still highly recommend finishing the first though.

Well, I have heard nothing but praises for the game. It's sitting in my library gathering dust. I need to make time for it. But I've heard that it rivals Skyrim (not my words, so don't quote me on it).

inb4 clown appears

Yes, and enjoy it while you can. If you end up liking the series enough to get into the books they'll ruin Witcher 1's story for you. The second game holds up much, much better.

I dunno man, it crashes on a lot of machines, especially with W7 and newer systems

I've tried messing around in The Witcher 1, but I still haven't gotten out of the starting castle. I always seem to lose interest. Of course, I had a smaller TV until very recently, which made all of the text on the menus a bit of a chore to navigate. I really should give it a third, honest chance before I give up and go to 2.

Definitely. It has amazing music and amazing atmosphere. But make sure to play past first chapter (I think it's called Prologue but I'm not sure) as it's the worst part of the game. Once you're out of the castle real fun starts.