So I've been playing this game for about 10-15 hours, and here is my quick opinion:
The Good:
The story is great. Very gripping at times. And dialogue is well written. And the graphics/textures are great. The landscapes are gorgeous to look at and traverse.
The quests are often interesting as well, giving you an end goal and allowing you a sandboxy multitude of ways to achieve it.
The Meh:
The combat is sort of meh. It revolves around timing your blocks, which is the fun part, and then countering your opponent, which is the frustrating part, because they seem to block 75% of the time no matter whether you feint, attack from the side, top, bottom, chain your attacks, etc.
The Bad:
The major problem I have with this game is the pacing. When you're not watching story play out, you're running from place to place. Every now and then (maybe like once per hour on average???) you get to actually fight something--and in half of those cases, the outcome doesn't matter because you're either supposed to lose, or your fight gets interrupted after 10-15 seconds by the scripted story. But the game is mostly about running from A to B, and then watching a story(occasionally choosing dialogue options), which thank god, is actually good, and then like once per hour you get to fight someone.
Adding to the pacing problem is the ever present load screens. Everytime you talk to someone, you get a load screen of about 5 seconds (more if it's a cutscene) or pull up your map, you get a load screen of about 3 seconds. I have a pretty high end machine although admittedly, I'm not running the game on SSD.
Add to this the very stringent saving feature (you have to drink an extremely expensive potion or sleep--but sleep-saving doesn't seem to always work.....) and a death or mistake can be extremely costly of your time (read: frustrating). Also, this means you can't just quit the game whenever you feel like it. You have to quit when the game autosaves for the most part, which mostly happens after completing a quest.
Lastly, the animations and lip syncing are pretty bad. This is where you can really tell this isn't a AAA game.
Overall:
If the game had better combat and perhaps more chances to partake in combat, it'd be a masterpiece. As it is, it's a decent game with a very well done, gripping story and beautiful graphics that gets boring relatively quickly due to the slow pacing and abundant loading screens.
The end result is that I enjoy myself when I'm playing in bite sized chunks, but I can only play so much of it at one time before either getting bored or frustrated and entertaining myself with some other game.
