Boys and girls, is Witcher 1 worth it to slog trough? Found it very tedious last time and I played it like 15 minutes every half year. Witcher 2 looks awesome and Witcher 3 is around the corner. I know I won't forgive myself I do not finish the trilogy fully but im not sure I can handle Witcher 1s clickity combat.
If you want to try getting into the series in earnest, I wouldn't advocate skipping the first game at all.
One of the biggest draws to the game is its morally ambiguous choices and delayed consequences, sometimes manifesting themselves many hours later. Unfortunately, it requires a time commitment to see your choices play out. My advise is for you to play out the first 2-3 major choices (you'll know when you've made them), and take a call on whether to continue playing or not.
The C&C themselves aren't as diverse as stuff from Alpha Protocol, or even New Vegas, but they are given appropriate context and compellingly framed in a way Bioware and Bethesda routinely fail to do. The writing is decent overall but one of the final plot twists is one of my favorites in recent memory. It was a minor bit of C&C, subtle enough to fly under the radar of non-observant players, but on spotting it, I couldn't help appreciate the writing for how understated and thematically appropriate it was.
I also felt that the first game did a better job at presenting the world compared to its sequel; the second one had a more narrow focus, mostly centered around politics right from the get go. On the other hand, the first one did a great job at presenting how bleak and cynical the world of the Witcher 1 is, often through just interactions with various country folk.
Lorewise, both games are probably important for different reasons. The first game has several major interactions regarding the Wild Hunt. On the other hand, the third game appears to be a direct continuation of the events that unfold in the second game (even more so than Witcher 1 --> Witcher 2), so it's bound to contain a lot of references to the events and characters of the second game. Both the games are story-driven games first and foremost, so you're likely to miss references to characters and events no matter how robust the summary journal entries are in subsequent games.
I found the combat to be the weaker aspects of both games, though for different reasons. The first game was entirely devoid of challenge and the mechanics themselves were incredibly simplistic, with only the alchemy system being a particularly neat idea. The second game's combat suffers from being unable to decide whether it wants to play like Arkham Asylum or Demon's Souls, often mixing elements of the two for a frustrating combat experience. The twitch-heavy action mechanics lack a refined foundation, leading to unsatisfactory strategies such as rolling around constantly, or spamming Quen to cast a damage shield on yourself. In hindsight, if you end up disliking both combat systems, I'd argue that the Witcher 1 is probably easier to get through since its combat demands far less from the player, allowing one to autopilot through the combat encounters to get to the narrative and C&C bits -- the main draws of the game.
If nothing else, the game's got an incredibly moody and atmospheric soundtrack that the second one does not live up to: