Going to echo the other people here saying it was too much like a single player MMO, and not in a good way. The areas were pretty enough, but the giant zones just felt 90% empty with wandering mobs getting in the way, pretty much like an MMO. This wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for pretty much every area being like this, just either open arena or narrow pathways. You certainly can't climb mountains to survey the whole area like you can in Skyrim, the zones are pretty much just obvious cutoffs designed to fit specific aesthetics. It doesn't feel like a living world, it's like separate levels on a video game, "oh look here's a forest level, and over here is the desert level, and maybe if we get far enough we'll see the swamp level".
The questing system is also something that should not have been aping so many MMOs. The point of all those area specific fetch quests is to take you to areas with other players fighting in them, in KoA it's just you alone out in the middle of nowhere doing an insane number of tedious sidequests for little to no reward. It works almost exactly like an MMO, you wander into a zone, pick up a bunch of random quests that have nothing to do with the main story, and usually finish a quest chain dealing with the story of that zone. This works in MMOs because there is no main story, you aren't the main protagonist, so you're usually portrayed as the wandering hero that solves random problems once he enters the area. In this game, it takes away from the main quest, I'm supposed to be this awesome destined hero, but it seems like every time I enter a new area, I'm just doing random chores for strangers. Random sidequests are a staple of RPGs, but the model used in KoA pretty much floods the player with random useless quests, to the point where I spend 90% of my time in a new zone doing nothing relating to the main story. This gets to the point where I actually forget what the hell my character is actually supposed to be doing.
The main story itself also suffers from rampant MMO syndrome. The main vilain is basically a non-entity for the majority of the game, helping random elves and villagers is common in RPGs, but you usually at least have the main story in the background, with a main quest chain that moves the story along. Pretty much up until you get to the next continent, the main villain is just a distant thing you hear about from time to time. Your told you need to stop him, but the game seems to go out of its way to make sure you don't actually have any meaningful interaction with him until the final dungeon. Speaking of the final dungeon, that whole level was obviously designed for an MMO raid party with it's massive corridors and way too large circular arenas every ten feet. The last boss himself is so generic I had to actually think about it for a good couple minutes just to remember what the hell it was. The lore itself is dense, but so damn boring I frequently forgot what the hell I was supposed to be doing half the time. I would come back to the game after a couple days and wonder to myself, "ok I'm in a desert. Why the hell am I in a desert? oh yeah I'm helping random miners, and stopping that whole end of the world thing I haven't heard about since the tutorial level." This works in an MMO because everybody can't be the protagonist, so you follow the zone storylines while working your way up to being part of the main attack force that eventually assaults the villain. In this game it just feels like my hero has the world's worst case of ADD.
As for the combat, yeah it starts out fun, but even only doing a few sidequests, you've pretty much unlocked the whole tree by about the halfway point in the game, then the rest of the game is spent fighting the same enemies over and over again for the next 20 hours. Even a great combat system gets boring without any major changeups in that amount of time. The combat is also hurt by the truly generic enemy design. I hope you liked the enemies you met by the time you make it to the desert, because 90% of the enemies you fight after that are all color palette swaps of each other. They are also about 80% variations on humanoid themes, you've got goblin knockoffs, humans/elves, trolls, and bigger trolls, that's about what you'll spend the vast majority of the game fighting, the few boss battles in the game are pretty uninspired, the only two I can remember even while thinking about it are the final boss and the giant during the siege.
As others have also said, the game itself is also just too damn easy, even on hard you still end up massively overleveling everything outside of the dungeons, the loot system is also pretty crappy, giving you stuff that should be epic quality, yet ends up worse than even the low level items you can craft. You think skyrim blacksmithing can make a character hilariously overpowered? Just wait until you realize you've crafted armor better than any noncrafted item in the game and your only at about the midway point, so you just spend the rest of the game collecting loot only for the compenents you need to squeeze a few extra points out of your next crafted piece, and your basically invincible in combat because you armor is twice as good as everything else in the game.
Despite all these criticisms, I still played and beat the game, it wasn't terrible, and like I said the combat was pretty fun, even if it was too damn easy, and the majority of it was wasted on generic palette swap enemies. The game is just painfully mediocre, and I struggled trying to remember as much about it as I did to make this post. I remember characters like Alduin, and Gwynn, or locations like Sovengard, and the underground ash lake from Dark Souls, but for the life of me almost the entirety of KoA is just one giant mass of blah, that I struggle to remember even one thing that stood out to me other than "yeah the combat was pretty fun for the first half of the game".
rigins on a console is a horrible mess of a clusterfuck too, but the game belongs to a different subgenre so it's hard to compare the two, let alone if you consider the PC version, which plays more RTS-lite like during combat.
