The gameplay on the first game was a bit bad. I did not mind the almost mobile style of play but it did not allow for any skill, playing it on hard was just punishment. That is my only objection, story wise I liked it more then the other ones, one of the few times I cared for the bad guy.

Witcher 2 was the best in my opinion but I can still play the first one and like it. As others have pointed out, at the very least they will remove the sex cards and "fix" some dialogue.

CDP were largely coming from a lineage of PC RPG design in TW1, which is why they used the NWN engine, had spacebar to pause & included a zoomed out cam that allowed boomers to play in a pseudo-isometric way, entirely mouse driven. Movement/reaction was of very low importance outside getting the combo rhythm right - almost everything else is either down to your stats, your pre-combat prep and getting your stance/skill usage right. That's fine by me, it's too easy but I at least have fun doing it. Comparatively I'm shocked how many players screw up the stance selection from the TW1 streams I've watched.

TW3's my favourite overall due to the world building, but TW1's second. I don't think it plays outright bad, it's just explicitly a different genre of gameplay from the latter two. Combat gameplay has kind of been their achilles heel across the whole trilogy, it just seems like they screwed up worse in TW1 if you go into all three expecting a pure action RPG. For me, you could put TW1's combat in 2&3 with some balance tweaks and they instantly become slightly better games because it's a farewell to rolling and quen spam which I found cancerous. I had to ban myself from using quen and tried to riposte everything I could to make TW3 combat fun, whereas I happily play TW1 on hard and use everything I like (although I don't go full Igni cannon which apparently is sleepwalk-tier).