I think a big problem with Witcher 1 is that its vision for combat was relatively novel and not well presented. In the lore it's emphasized that fighting is supposed to be a sort of graceful dance and so the combat tries to mimic that. The combat is much more like a bemani (beat/music type game) game than an action RPG, even though it looks nothing like the former and everything like the latter.

Once you 'get' this, everything makes way more sense, the game flows, and it becomes really quite fun. I played it when it first came out. I didn't get it, and quit before beating the first chapter. I later replayed it, got it, and ended up playing through it multiple times on max difficulty.