When I started playing KoA I was blown away. I shook my head violently at each and every negative review and thought: these guys have no idea what a good game is all about.
I loved the style, gameplay, combat, skill trees, loot..everything about it. Especially the voice acting deserves some serious credit because it's simply out of this world.
I played for days on end and then came to the conclusion that it starting getting too easy.. or actually it was easy from the very beginning. So easy in fact that I installed the KoA Heartcore mod to increase it's difficulty and sure enough, enemies got tougher and I actually needed to watch my step.
I enjoyed it for another few days and then noticed something about the way I was playing this game.
I had my map open 90% of the time just running from yellow dot to yellow dot doing quest related stuff. I had no idea what the quest was about until I got there (no doubt one of the many...many..many fetch and return or go there and kill that quests) and killed anything I encountered. Once every few hours I travelled around collecting rewards and that was pretty much it. The story lost me, too linear and predictable, the quests got boring and most of all...the combat system I liked so much got boring..really boring.
Once you get to know an enemy and it's few patterns the fun is over...you can practically kill anything with a butter knife.
All that was left in the end was a beautiful game with great voice acting and a mediocre story..