Just played through the demo. I definitely liked what was there. Combat was a little mashy, lots of pressing X over and over for melee, but this is literally the opening of the game so you don't have many skills to work with yet. It's fun, though. Feels very fluid, looks good, and chaining combos together is satisfying, whether you're using one weapon or combining all three (melee, ranged, and magic abilities). Some pretty sweet finishing moves for stealth characters as well.
The world looks great. I love it. Super colourful, lots of nice ambient sounds, animals running around, etc. It's actually a lot more open than I thought it would be so that's nice. I was expecting it to be as "open" as Fable, but areas seem way, way bigger than that. Definitely some exploration to be had. Though when I first stepped outside I did run into a few small barriers that were kind of jarring. After playing so much Skyrim, it was weird to not be able to bypass a knee-high fence, or hop down into a river, but you sorta stop running into that once you get a feel for how they've laid out the world.
Technically seems fine. No framerate issues, animations look superb, and the loading times are solid. 5-6 seconds at most to get in and out of a dungeon or building. I had seen a video for some press preview last week that showed a few load times up near a minute, but that thankfully doesn't seem to be present anymore.
The menus and general UI is fantastic. All information when you're looking at things like skills, equipment, and quests is concise and easily accessed. They did a real good job with all of that. Also love how quick and easy looting is. When I open a chest with armor or weapons I can, without pausing the game or opening up any additional menus, see how the loot compares to what I currently have, I can equip it and choose which slot for it to go into, or I can automatically send it to the trash pile (vendors have a handy "sell all junk" option). Couldn't be easier.
Could anyone comment about the general "atmosphear" and the quality of the writting/dubbing?
I was asking a lot of questions to NPC's for background info so I mostly got standard info dumps and whatnot, jury is still out on the writing I guess. The lore and setup for the game's story is interesting, though.
The voice acting I heard was good. That'll probably vary as it does in almost any RPG with a ton of voiced NPC's, but I'm liking it so far.