I'm sure many others have pointed this out, but it's totally new to me. I was rereading "The Last Wish", and around page 84, there's this Well In anycase, I was excited to find it and I'm sure this'll be new for some :)

Indeed, good find! I would never have known this if you hadn't found it and shared it here.

There are some very close references to the book. In the Enhanced Edition of the first Witcher, there was an additional quest called "The Prize of Neutrality", with a story that was very similar to another story in The Last Wish (I don't recall the title, though).

lesser Evil i belive

Ahem, the whole Alvin-Geralt-Triss relationship kinda smacks of what happened with Ciri.

That's cool :D

The beginning of Melitele's Heart quest - when you talk to Newboy - also references a story from The Sword of Destiny, the one about golden dragon :)

Yikes! don't compare that Alvin brat to adorable little Ciri! Also, she's the adoptive daugther of Geralt and Yennefer. But it's true, they might have adapted the basic idea for the first witcher game.

There are a lot of references to the stories in the books. Alone to met again with Yarpen Zigrin was bringing up memories of old times - for me, of course, as Geralt doesn't remember it, what a pity.

The story about the golden dragon, yes, there are Crinfried Reavers in the story. It's also one of the episodes of the witcher series. Incidentally, the last one I saw before the game and the story.

Well other than the change of names and locations it is basically a watered-down repackage of Ciri-Yennefer-Geralt affair.

Both of them are Sources. They go into trance and prophesize. They barely escaped persecution several times. The heroine shows motherly love towards them. They keep changing hands (by that I mean having different caretakers at different point in time).

Look, I said "It's true..."
But I still don't like it personally, because of the huge difference in personality of the two sources. And I didn't see motherly love in Triss, but that might just be a result of Triss' portrayal in TW1, which is less than ideal in the opposite direction than it is less than ideal in TW2... ;)

It seems to me that The Witcher 1 was a game *based* on the books rather than intending to really fit into the canon. They took elements from all the various stories and adapted them into a single story/game. All in all, I feel they did a good job but if you have read the books it will certainly feel like they've poached stories and just swapped the names around, such as replacing the Yennefer-Ciri business with Triss-Alvin somewhat.

My guess is they did this for lots of practical reasons but didn't think it will cause any problems down the line. But the game did far better than they expected in the international market, which means people (investors) demand a sequel. For The Witcher 2, they decided to do a more original story that fits into the cannon better and put more emphasis on the original source material. This means the weighting of characters and story elements have to change somewhat, so you get things like the weird Triss-Yennefer shift.

I don't think there's any right/wrong here. The games were made as separate projects and a actual multi-game storyline was not planned at the start. They did one thing for the first project and have different goals for the second, so just have to link things together as best they can and compromise here and there. On the whole, all things considered, I think they did as good as job as can be expected.