NOTE: If you don't like this game in the first hour get OUT and get a refund. STEAM will not refund if you play more than 2 hours. I wasted too much time trying to like yet learning to dislike this game and then got ripped off by STEAM because I played too long to get a refund so yeah, not good.
This game has many good features but it also has many awful ones too. Instead of just letting you make a game save with a time stamp whenever you like and be able to just reload that save immediately to return to that exact point - you know, the norm - you have 2 bad choices in this game. There is a limited amount of a "potion" that will allow you to save, yeah, that's right, some potion to save the game. And that potion is in very limited quantities. Yeah, no kidding, utterly ridiculous. OR you have plan B which is to save and exit the ENTIRE GAME and then reload the entire game. So one might think, that shouldn't matter too much, but it really does. You see you need lockpicking in this game and in the first 13 hours of playing and using all the stater guides available I was only able to find about 5 lockpicks and lockpicking is very clumsy in this game, its also non-intuitive. So an average player would destroy all 5 of those on the first lock they tried to learn on and be left with nothing. So you need to save first, try it, and when you break a lockpick, restart the ENTIRE GAME and try again. Honestly, this was just too ridiculous for me, too annoying. Horseback riding was also awful. Never wanted to do that again. The story line is rather depressing and its not open world, you need to follow it. You cant name or change the look or even sex of your toon. You gather a bunch of materials and then you must leave it in other towns that you have no easy way to return to. I could go on but what's the point. The more I played the less fun it was. Other people commented that it suddenly gets way better about 60 hours in but I had already wasted 13 hours and it was getting worse. To me endgame is the most boring part of the game, you are usually overpowered and oversupplied by endgame so life is pretty easy. It just becomes a grind with diminishing returns. The start of the game should be challenging but it needs to be intuitive, rewarding and fun also. This game was not.
On the positive side the game controls for PC with or without controller worked very well. They have food that spoils in storage which is a realistic and unique touch. The codex is very informative, I actually enjoyed reading it and it gave a lot of useful info about medieval life. I liked a lot of the dialogue and found it interesting and realistic. I like that this game has a mature hard edge to it and is not a game for creampuffs. So there was a lot I actually liked but the things I didn't like were just way too annoying to deal with. Also the next time a game has this many annoying qualities I will get out immediately and request a refund so as not to get ripped off by STEAM again. I wasted 13 hours in this annoying game and had to eat the price for it. Not cool.