There's a lot of good advocacy here, I will check it out once school/work chill out a bit, thanks everyone. I'll just start with TW1, I go back and play a lot of 10+ year old games and enjoy them so the dated visuals won't detract as much as my obsessive nature would yell at me for skipping games.
EDIT: The Witcher games are on deep discount right now on gog, so you can pick up the enhanced/director's cut/game of the year version of all 3 for less than $20 right now, so if anyone is in the same boat as I've been in this is the best price I've seen on these games.