Yeah, Witcher 1's controls very nearly soured me on the game, and being that I didn't have quite enough of a beefy computer to play it, the controls were a pain to deal with and made playing it almost impossible. I gave up on it at one point but eventually returned to it once I had a better computer, but it was still not much better in terms of gameplay. And to think some prefer the first game over the second. The game has what I feel is a pretty high difficulty curve too. When you first start out, it's very easy to get killed if you don't know what you're doing, and given that the enemies can gang up on you and interrupt your rhythm-based combat and completely overwhelm you, it becomes very frustrating quickly. The game is odd in the sense that the hardest parts are actually in the beginning stages, the inverse of many games, and I only found it got easier once I got about halfway through it. I never actually completed it though as I found myself in an unwinnable situation. See, I never realized that potion making was essential. In most games, it's an option like in the Elder Scrolls series. So, I wasn't terribly interested in potion making in this game and ignored it. I manage to get to the end boss and having a terribly difficult time with it, feeling it impossible, because they're actually two bosses, one right after the other with no opportunity to do anything in between, which IMHO makes it that much harder. I just couldn't do it. While searching online, I realized what I needed to do was craft a potion that would regenerate my health in a sustained manner. But guess what? I didn't have the necessary skills as I never did play around with potion-making, yet the game fully expected I had. That is down to the confusing nature of the quest system in that game and the ambiguity it provided and allowing me to progress without something I critically needed. That is what I call poor design.
