I bought and played the game right on release and found it pleasantly challenging. You had to use all your weapons from daggers to bombs to traps to survive fights and it made the game tense and gripping. Then lots of people started to complain it was too hard and it seems they patched the game to become ridiculously easy.

I decided to replay the game (due to losing my job right as the game was released, I had to quit playing after you reach the dwarven city) only to find that the game had changed quite a bit. There's an Arena which tests your strength and proposes a difficulty. For me, it proposed "insane" and I never even came close to dying in the Arena. In fact, I didn't need to use knives of bombs or traps or anything except my silver and steel sword. Roll and hit, roll and hit, use Quen before each fight and you can play infinitely.

I hoped the actual game would be harder but if anything, it's even easier! I set the difficulty to second hardest (Insane, the highest, has perma-death which isn't my thing since some areas like with the dragon can be insta-kill). I can easily take down enemies in a few movies without breaking a single sweat. The first time I played the game, I had to retreat, use spells, dodge, roll, evade to survive. Now I had to run forward, hit and they die.

Is there any way to make the game more challenging? Does it get harder later on? Because I'm certainly disappointed with how easy the game has become. I found the pre-patched version a lot of fun due to the fact that you had to use all your tools and now it's like the game goes "nah, you don't need alchemy, bombs, throwing knives and stuff - just whack your sword". Very disappointing ...

Sounds good, I'll give it a try. Right now, the game is so laughably easy, I don't see how they could ever call it "hard". I haven't died a single time and don't use any oils or potions or bombs or traps. It's really sad since I LOVED the original challenge. Venturing out in the woods in Flotsam really put me on edge and even a few enemies at a time would tax your skills. A shame ...

I used two mods to increase difficulty - Better Combat and Complete Equipment Overhaul. There is some overlap but the authors made compatible versions. The former mostly rebalances the power of Geralt's skill tree so you don't become godlike. The latter nerfs/rebalances the equipment so it's not so easy to become all-powerful through gear. Combined the two mods make a challenging game. I would choose these if you want to play closer to the original TW2 experience but with the challenge restored.

Full Combat Rebalance is a radical change to the game. You will basically have to re-learn how to fight. Furthermore, it goes well beyond combat and changes monsters, gear, quest rewards, and a whole ton of stuff. I would choose this only if you're ready to have an entirely different gameplay experience. Whether it's better or not is up to you, but it is challenging.

Also I haven't tried it but I think there's a "Dark" difficulty mode that's supposed to be very hard. I don't know if it has perma-death or not though.

One important thing that the full combat rebalance does right is making Geralt more responsive and that's really, really good.

Queuing combat commands gets old really fast :/ I finished the game a few times with the default mechanics, and it's fine... but people accustomed to more tighter controls will like the mod a lot.