Today is the birthday of a man who gave us a saga, that lead to creation of one of the best CRPG series. Although I do not have means to reach him, and thank him today in person, I'm pretty sure someone from CDPR will. If you feel like expressing your gratitude, even if you haven't read the books, I think it'll be fine to do that here.

It's also father's day isn't it? Kind of appropriate I suppose.

Yes, Happy birthday and father's day to the father of the Witcher.

Awesome! Great sentiments. I really do have to get a copy of the stories some time, see where the games match and diverge.

Hear, hear!

Dunno if he's likely to see this post or not (probably not), but I'd like to express my gratitude to him for the creation of The Witcher universe also. I own all 3 games although I only briefly played the first one for a day or so, and only tested out the second game to see the engine. I'm excited to play through all 3 for some time now but once The Witcher 3 was released I have been addicted to it ever since so I'll be playing the first 2 games through at a later date. :) I do some day wish to read all of the lore that the games are based upon though and will likely buy the series of books or audio books sometime as a result. Such an amazing game series, I can only imagine the books are amazing as well!

Do that!
I think the books are great; I find it hard to tell what the game might feel like if I hadn't read the stories before, but I think a lot would be missing.
I don't know about the quality of the translation for whichever language you may read them in, but even so, I guess they will be good - even without the subtleties there is so much in there. (Most of all, entertainment!)

I think the game captures some parts very well, but others are missing - and some have to, to allow the player enough freedom. Geralts ethics, for example ;)

Thank you, Andrej Sapkowski, for writing this series!
(And thank you, CDPR, for making the world notice what is already popular in Poland!)

My version of Geralt is way too nosy for his own good and constantly tries to help the downtrodden... he even gives up his reward every once in a while... of course it helps that I've somehow managed to break the economy at some point between Velen and Novigrad and am now sitting on over 30000 crowns.

That's why I said someone from CDPR could. Though seeing there are just few of us, I'm not sure if this makes any sense, I mean, come on, there is over 1.3M copies sold, nobody gives a fuck? And how's testing went? Tis a disaster, or it's not that bad? ;) Only don't play them in reverse order, start with first one. :) Despite being old visually and having some "first game ever" problems (few, really), for me this is best Witcher game. Not as huge as third, true, but just right, seriously, who needs 80 smugglers' caches in Skellige? Whoah, easy, Roach!
You have approximately two years to the moment when last two books are going to be published on English in NA (AFAIK). So, plenty of time to play first games and to start reading earlier books, which are, by my opinion, are far more better. I'm not saying last 2 are horrible, but first two were just amazing, and were extremely easy, fast, and interesting to read. To an extent, Witcher game trilogy is somewhat resembles books - good beginning, slight "bog" in the middle, and bit long, difficult to go through. And I can't say last two books are poorly written, use a bad language, or discuss very difficult, complicated questions, but in comparison to earlier books they were slower. It's like going through chest-deep snow, on skis or with your feet - you'll get there, but it'll be two different form of travel. I second that. :) What I do like, is that games are stand-alone, you'll get most of the story from games themselves, but if you read the books, games will be full of little "insider jokes" here and there (second being weakest in this aspect, IMHO, because reaso... Game of thrones poisoning;P). It's not like some other games where, if you haven't read a books, you won't get a thing. Who is James Vega? What had happened between Halo 2 and 3, how fight was finished? How the fuck I should know, not in games! :D Ah, translation, the thing the hurts the most. It's hard to exactly translate Slavic mythology and terms onto foreign language that doesn't even have proper terms to describe certain thing. In this aspect English version may suffer certain drawbacks (seriously, why potty joke was missed from Witcher 1? Pure golden, I think). But in terms of VO, English, despite suffering low number of actual actors involved (that is very easy to hear in W3, as we hear Roche, Iorveth, Keira, Letho, etc, voices everywhere), have probably best quality. My IMHO, of course. Yeah, tell that anita and her friends, who insist our mythology doesn't even exist.