And why exactly ?
I had played The Witcher 1 when it came out in 2007. Awesome game. Load-times were unbelievable long. But they fixed that. And then there was the combat. Pretty bad. In the sense that it felt clunky and not fun. I played until half-way the game, and then stopped. I never continued. I planned to, but never did.
Then I played The Witcher 2. The first half hour is terrible. That might be why you didn't like the game. The first half hour is just a show-off of the engine. You move forward through the story by pressing W and going through QuickTime Events. I hated it. But once you get passed that, the game improves. The maps are rather big and detailed, the graphics were very good at the time, the artwork is nice. Gameplay is ok. If you use alchemy a bit, it makes the game a lot easier. Decent story. I really enjoyed it. The first half hour is not a good indication for the whole game.
I replayed Thief-1 in January. I played it in 1999, and always wanted to replay it. Only took 15 years.
I then played Dying Light, and finished it. Nice game. And two days ago I re-installed The Witcher 1. To finally finish the game. I found out I still had my old save-games, so I can start at Chapter III, in stead of the prologue. It's a long game. Within minutes I realized how bad the combat was. But now that I played it a bit, and customized my controls again, it's not so bad. It looks like I will finally finish the game.
I installed a texture pack. I enabled 4xSGSSAA. I enabled SSAO. The game doesn't look dated at all. (It's 7.5 years, after all). Rather good actually. During the last year I've read the first book in The Witcher series. Suddenly lots of little things in the game sound familiar. And that's after only reading one out of 7 books. I plan to keep reading the books a bit. I'll be all prepared for The Witcher III.
TL;DR: If you didn't like The Witcher 1 because of combat, try again. It grows on you. If you didn't like The Witcher 2 because of the first hour, try again, the rest of the game is 10x better than the first hour.