Haha, yeah, the Outskirts are probably only slow on your first try, when you still have to figure things out. At least it was for me. Now Geralt can complete that chapter in two days. I don't really like the ending of it though, because by the looks of it everybody dies and I can't imagine that everyone in the village was bad. Well, the most prominent villagers survive if you hand over Abigail, but they did do bad things. I guess that's The Witcher for you.

I did like that later chapters tie back to the first, mostly by finding out that Carmen is the priest's daughter and that she was raped by Mikul. And of course chapter IV, though I kinda dislike how it considers Abigail "innocent". I don't think she really was, and that ambiguity made the choice more difficult.
Anyway, I just finished my second Iorveth playthrough, for the first time playing on dark difficulty. I didn't die as often as I'd feared, yay! (okay, the Kayran took me an hour, and the dragon half an hour, but still!). Played both through saving Triss again and saving Saskia, but I'm a bit confused about how Geralt uses the dagger: Philippa said you had to plunge it into the dragon's heart, and that all the runes had to touch blood, but Geralt just holds it against the dragon's head. She was impaled on a tree, but there was no blood on her head, so what's up with that? Does it simply mean that Philippa was lying?