Iorveth is fighting for freedom. I find that very easy to sympathize with. That he's a bastard comes with the territory.
The Scoia'tael vs. humans conflict in Witcher's universe always seemed very clear cut to me. Of course the elves and dwarves are in the right, hence Iorveth over Roche.
Yeah, sorry, a side that harkens back to an idealized past where everything was A-OK untill scummy Mankind came into it and ruined everything, that they pile all their blame on is the not the side that's going to get my sympathy.
Wither's Elves are like Tolkien's only without their aged world wiriness and sad acknowledgement that their time has passed and it's now Man's world, not theirs. While Tolkien's had some other place to faff off to, the Witcher's Elves have to get used to living a different world, but instead that faction decides to go off causing trouble for a cobbled bunch of reasons that make them come off having Communist Revolutionary, Nazi and Islamist tendencies.
That and I'm fucking tired of Mankind being the bad guy in fiction like Fantasy, the Witcher all the more so when their history essentially begins by them being dumped on the shores of the world the stories are set in with no way of getting back to where they came from. It forced them and everyone else into a zero sum game of dominance and they won.
I'm pretty sure no one would ever do that if someone else took their land.
Then you don't know much about history, like the Barbarian migrations being them fleeing conquest by the Huns or the past 200 years of Circassian history and where most of them live now, or, I dunno, all the "insert ethnic group here" Diaspora's throughout history.
. AND, never forget the fact that your final boss is basically Fantasy Al Gore. W1 is about climate change, and that's not even a joke. Don't get me wrong, I love W1, but you people are clearly being nostalgic in your comparisons.
That's a very exaggerated take on the ending. The danger the enemy foresaw was 10,000 years off and was essentially just the coming of an Ice Age, something we can all agree comes and goes through history, not something like Gore pushes where we have to de-industrialize NOW to prevent the end of the world in 50 years.
One could even get introspective and imagine the first games plot revolving around what it might be like for fantasy people to face the idea of something we all know like an Ice Age, where we understand them and that they're natural, while he goes nuts and starts using magic and other fantastic bullshit to try to prepare for it.
And I wouldn't call him the real antagonist of the first game, the events you're directly facing are a fabric for the deeper conflict to work on, namely Geralt's return to life and the Wild Hunt's involvement behind it, especially their King's opinion on what Geralt's purpose in life is and it's impact on his Witcher ethics.