To me, witcher 1 definitely has the best atmosphere, witcher 2 is not bad, just it has the worst story telling and atomsphere among the series, imo.
Agreed. In my opinion TW1>TW3>TW2 in terms of atmosphere, story, gameplay, being true to the source material in terms of the world setting and the main character.
In my mind you can definitely extrapolate the following passage from the Witcher 2 Enhanced Edition artbook about Geralt's model when comparing the atmosphere the first two games:
Creating Geralt's character for the Witcher 2 was a challenge as difficult as it was for the first game, though for slightly different reasons. We were designing him from scratch back then, and we had to rise up to the expectations of fans of the novels. Now, however, our graphic artists faced a new challenge - designing the main character's appearance using the new graphical engine and all of its new possibilities.
To me The Witcher 1 was 99% perfect. The atmosphere, the architecture, world lore, characters were all unlike most Western RPGs. In TW2 I saw a stark contrast and a huge departure from the 1st game and Sapkowski's world overall. In TW2 Geralt essentially becomes a pack mule hoarding, crafting and swapping gear like there's no tomorrow. The locations start to look more like a dream sequences rather than a grim realistic setting that was presented in the books and the 1st game. Even monsters get created from the ground up and are not that interesting to the Slavic-influenced monsters from the 1st game and books. The differences that made the 1st game stand out in the crowd started to wane and that trend continued with the 3rd installment.
And even now when I read Wild Hunt reviews 90% of reviewers hadn't even played the 1st game (or read the books) which is a shame because the first game offers you so much more in terms of immersion. And that very same fact [that most of them didn't play the 1st game] makes it obvious that CDPR
did succeed in marketing and selling the 2nd and especially the 3rd game to the maximum possible audience. They catered to the widest possible audience which is why you see people asking for an option to create their own customized character (and some labeling the lack of that as one of the drawback of the 3rd game).
Now don't get me wrong The Witcher 2 is a really good game it's just that it has so many characteristics that differ it from the whole Witcher universe and make it hard to consider it a part of said universe.
TW3 is certainly a step up from the 2nd installment but still in terms of atmosphere and immersion it still lags behind that old almost 10-year old game build on an outdated Aurora engine. If you look up the first work in-progress screenshots of TW1 and then compare them to the released version you'd find that the amount of effort CDPR put into it is astounding.
Comparing TW1 with TW3 IMHO is great example of "Less is more".
Pardon my rant.
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