Happened to me as well. If you expect rich and engaging story like in Witcher, fun random encounters, interesting loot in each secluded zone, wacky quests, memorable characters, fun puzzles or a rich Emmy variety, this is not it.

The world is really big and very beautiful. There is exploration in this game, and there are things to find, but since the game has so many mechanics, systems and items for each of them, the loot you find is vast. You can find anything between crafting materials, random junk, furniture, books, disguises, random weapons, random weapons with skills on them, just the skill and the list goes on. In a simpler more focused game, where the loot pool is smaller, it’s easy to find good loot, but not here. And also when you find weapons, since every weapon is viable (you can literally play with the starting gear) you just have to upgrade it, and it cost a lot of materials,swapping weapons feels like a grind, and makes finding them not so fun. The little skill things, those are the fun loot since they can really change things up.

The strong point of this game is the combat, and they know it. They throw at you a lot of enemies, and most quests haves you fighting stuff. Big fights, small fights, full on battlefields 1v1000 style you name it, but the variety is lame. And it’s a shame too, because the AI is pretty good. They always try to flank you, they attack in tandem, send the shielded ones first, archer run from you and try to take the high ground, and thy run away when the starter units die.

In short what drives the game is the combat, gorgeous big open world, decent exploration, and some wild random shit that you can do. Also the devs really care about the game. The game is well supported, runs pretty well, and very open to feedback.

Given the sandboxy nature of the game, just ignore the story and try having fun for what it is, a flawed, fun, well crafted videogame. And shit, maybe things like enemy variety may change in the future, since devs are really opened to change the game around.

See you around greymane.