What is this, gif for ants??
Yes.
(No but I didn't want to clog down the thread with super large gifs, they do the job)
I'm assuming you actually prioritize gameplay, but did you end up enjoying TLOU? If so, you'd probably find about as much enjoyment with TW3, since they both are very similar regarding presentation and priorities...
At least with TLOU though, the stages were a lot more focused, and not "glued" together by extremely large stretches of nothing important.
I did enjoy TLoU, I found the gameplay (stealth and combat) to be adequate too. Controls were responsive and it was decently challenging.
I don't think there's a single action WRPG out there that actually has good combat. TW3's combat is one of the better ones compared to other WRPGs, but it still isn't good.
Kingdoms of Amalur almost had good combat. It plays well and has lots of cool abilities, but it's too easy, which means all the cool stuff is useless as you can just button mash your way to victory.
I mean, if you ignore the part where everything but combat in Dragon's Dogma is shit.
No. It has a great soundtrack, lots of depth to the customization and character building, excellent monster design, rewarding exploration and loot, decent dungeon design (not nearly as good as Souls, but still has some highlights), good atmosphere, and a pretty cool ending.
Yes, but people are using games like Dragon's Dogma as an example of an open world RPG like The Witcher 3 that's capable of having good combat, and shaming The Witcher 3 for not being able to accomplish the same thing, while not acknowledging that Dragon's Dogma fails in every other area that makes an open world RPG good, whereas The Witcher 3 does astoundingly well in those areas.
That depends on what's important for you in an open-world RPG. I play them for the exploration/looting and combat and for the questing. DD's quests might be generic, but they are fun, because they typically make me go to a cool dungeon to explore/loot and fun monsters to kill. The non-combat quests are usually annoying (e.g. babysitting that annoying little girl, lol), but that's not a big deal because there's few of them and they aren't too intrusive.
If your open-world RPG has bad combat, at least have a way to consistently avoid it. Fallout: New Vegas does this well. It compensates with having exceptional quest design and myriads of ways to solve quests, and very often without any combat at all. So I don't play it for the looting/combat, but for the quests and how to approach each quest and how they impact the game world. Fallout 3 failed at this, because the quest design was much weaker overall. If F:NV quests were just "follow waypoint, kill monster" couched in nice language/writing, it would still suck for me because the obligatory combat part would be tedious and annoying.
In any case, Sanctuary has a good point; the primary weakness of DD is the writing. It shows that it's very possible to have a large-scale open-world RPG with good combat in it, it's not a limitation of the genre or of tech ("you must have good combat OR good writing, choose one!").