I have no idea what happens in this game, even though I beat it last night.
First off-- the interface is awful. It's not built for a mouse, with its text lists hidden under tabs and buried inside menus. Usually with PC games you can blame bad UI on console-oriented development, but I'd hesitate to use the word 'consolized' here since it's even worse cycling through all of this on a gamepad. Additionally, without keyboard hotkeys at your disposal you're forced to use the pause screen to access your inventories. This makes your items roughly as accessible as the brightness calibration settings.
But play with a gamepad anyway, because the combat is very much built for that experience. That's not to say the combat is all that great regardless. It's a hack and slash affair, but unresponsive and clumsy. I played with the Full Combat Rebalance Mod, but no amount of rebalancing could fix the issues this game has. Geralt will seemingly arbitrarily decide whether or not he wants to close the gap between an enemy, and sometimes his sword swings will appear to connect but be completely ineffectual. The same feeling of randomness applies to defense: the difference between being massacred and finishing a fight with no damage taken seems to be up to juju instead of skill, tactics, or preparation. Speaking of preparation, there's no way to drink potions mid-combat (so, no amount of damage control if the arbitary nature of the combat swings the wrong way). Instead you must prepare in advance with buffs and regeneration-focused healing. On paper this is incredibly interesting to me, but in practice it does not work. The game rarely warns you of its dangers ahead of time. It's mostly up to you to die and then reload, therefore imbuing Geralt with predetermination of upcoming threats.
There are wilderness areas, but the value in exploring is very low. Anything interesting you stumble upon will be tied to some explicit quest sooner or later, and the quests do not mutate in any way if you discover pieces of them out of order. For example, in my Chapter 2 there's a priest-type guy who lives in the woods. I found him by accident, but he wouldn't tell me anything worth knowing until the main quest made me go back and visit him later. The only benefit to finding him early was a lot of downtime spent walking back and forth. Walking is what you do a lot of, and it is the most challenging aspect of the game. In order to mask load times even outdoor environments are segmented into twisting, convoluted tunnels that fail to converge in a satisfying way, with numerous dead ends and blocked passages. If you're not walking towards an icon on your minimap you're wasting your time, but getting to the icon is always far more arduous than any event that happens once you get there.
Witcher II sells itself on its 'big consequences' as a result of your choices. This is more or less true, but in an incredibly restrictive way, which undermines the whole idea a bit. The game says "go to A" and sometimes it says "go to A or B" and that's the choice. The BIG THING about this game is that at the end of Chapter 1 you branch into what is essentially two different games. It is, admittedly, a major point of divergence as a result, but there's no real player expression to be found in the choices. You're not crafting your own narrative, you're just choosing between two different, very linear narratives: The Witcher 2a or The Witcher 2b. It's the sort of thing that's impressive to list as a bullet point, but comes across as quite wasteful in practice. Considering how impenetrably confusing the story is, it certainly seems like they were trying to simultaneously write two different, but intersecting, plots about the intricacies of spies and politics.
I'm sorry, but it just makes no sense. I put my best effort forward to meet the game halfway, but conversations left me reeling. Who? What? How did this other character know that? Am I supposed to know who it is they are talking about? I understand that these games are based on a series of books, and maybe it makes more sense if you have intimate knowledge of those. But it's like if the second Lord of the Rings movie suddenly required knowledge of The Silmarillion to even make sense. I played the first game a year or two before playing Witcher 2. I know the gist of the ideas and remember a few major characters. I've absorbed enough through osmosis to vaguely know who 'Ciri' and 'Yennefer' are. God help me if I didn't, because the game never really explains who Yennefer is despite Geralt's major motivation being to find her. I think. The game is not only unhappy with my shallow knowledge, it also demands I know the geography of the realm, the political situation in each of the kingdoms, and which obscure events from earlier in the game are going to be incredibly important and which ones are not.
It's just a poor showing all the way round, and despite being a technical showpiece in the year of its release, the high saturation and heavy bloom effects made it a bit of an eyesore for me. I'm still somewhat invested in the idea of The Witcher as a series, but I doubt I'll ever find a need to play this again even if I did only experience half of it.