Has hundreds of hours of content but it lacks a good story to make me want to delve in. Like grinding MMO levels alone.
The most disappointing aspect of this is how little I cared about anything when I was playing. Coming off of Mass Effect and Witcher 2, I certainly wanted something decent. Instead, I got a world of bland stereotypes for NPC's, uncreative factions, and a game that seems to be suffering an identity crisis. It can't decide whether it wants to be an action game, an RPG, a Bethesda game, or Fable. Most quests are fetch quests, kill ten of X, or kill X mobs and receive Y daggers. It tries to be all of them by including out of place abilities like allowing NPC killing sprees, while maintaining a strange MMO feel. It really just fails in all areas.
The combat system emphasizes doing anything you desire skill-wise, which is done quite well; you can swap magic, stealth, and melee on the fly in a Fable-like way except there are more options and customization possibilities. The skills are broken up into essentially mage, rogue and warrior skills and have skill trees reminiscent of an MMO, with skill points gained every levelup. The bad part of combat is that your player movement itself feels so light and lacks a heavy feel. Your character feels like he's floating. Weapons give a "mmph" to them but movement is so airy that it's annoying to move around in this game. Combat emphasizes movement so that's a big negative.
The world itself is completely generic as far as RPG's go. There's a mystical elf-like race that doesn't wanna be bothered by humans, and humans. There are some other races as well but they're peripheral to the experience. The fate thing is uninteresting. Essentially you are brought back to life, so now you have no "fate" or guiding principle to abide by, thus allowing you freedom to do as you please. Which means you travel from town to town doing World of Warcraft quests in a single player game, really. The game tells its story by making you pick up these stones that give you bonuses but also make you listen to these boring, cliche fantasy stories.
There is crafting, but it seems strange to me. Either it's too complicated and I got lucky to make whatever I did, or its not great and I just easily crafted items not knowing the UI. Either way, it feels unsatisfying because there's already tons of loot. Same goes for alchemy.
If you enjoy the combat system and aren't too interested in story, then you can definitely sink hundreds of hours into this game...provided you do all the side content (of which there is tons). But if you're into an RPG with story that matters and choice, don't be fooled by the dialog wheel. The wheel really does nothing but allow you to reject quests, occasionally stealing the reward you were supposed to give to the quest giver. You can decide to get support from different allies with it, but with such a lack of personality and so much arbitrary story being thrown at you, it feels like there's no difference in any action you take.
If you're into grinding forever, I'd recommend any of the number of F2P MMO's like Lord of the Rings. And if you're into just solid combat experiences and don't care how long they are, go play Darksiders or Warhammer Space Marine.