Pleasant? What? Most of the game content is boring NPC telling you to go 1.201 Kms away, recover an item or killing someone, and return to them. Most of the main quest has no special encounters, locations or even setpieces, it's just the same clear the enemy fort bullshit repeated from 80 hours of playthrough. There's no heart, no soul, in this garbage product. The animations during dialogue are worse than ME Andromeda, the world is samey, boring and empty, voice acting is cringe, role playing is non existant.
Hence the 'surprisingly' in front of 'pleasant'. I didn't expect to enjoy it that much, but for me, it works. I'm a sucker for big open worlds, as empty as they may be, and I really loved the sights traveling around this one. The world is boring and empty? Sure. It is samey? Well, that depends on what you call samey. For sure, it's all mediterranean landscapes, but well, that's what it's supposed to be like, and I thought plenty of areas had their own feel, between cities, villages, island settlements, clay pits... But then I'm not much of a fan of the grass-area, snow-area, swamp-area, desert-area, lava-area and undead nuclear wasteland area trope. When the scale is what it is in modern games, I find the multi-biome thing rather jarring.
Quest-wise, sure, most quests are cookie cutter stuff, but you quickly learn to ignore the obvious most shitty ones (conveniently flagged with an hourglass or arrows icons). The rest is a mixed bag but I regularly found some that were a bit above and amused me.
The voice acting is awful, no complaints there. It's not just the voice though, it's the whole out-of-place modern english swearing but-with-a-foreign-accent. Really really poor effort that.
Also...better combat than The Witcher 3? Seriosuly? The combat in this game is abysmal, it's a series of damage sponges that you can't defeat if they are even 2 levels above you, with gameplay mechanics that either force you to spam the attack the attack button or use the bow and running aroud in reverse to avoid the attack. The parry is shit and the animations are garbage and over exagerated.
Well, I will salute your high standards for combat. While I wouldn't have minded a better model, I thought it was good enough to work out. There are plenty of takedown options from far away to up close, and that was enough to make those forts entertaining over the duration of the storyline to me. I've done everything between sniping the Polemarch/items, silently exterminating every single soul, and charging loudly through the front door, depending on the mood. With the addition of naval combat, it made for more variety than the Sign/Dodge/LightAttack/LightAttack/LightAttack routine in W3. Damage sponges have only ever been an issue on Tutorial Island to me, mayyyyybe Megaris, but not even sure. After that everything was rather manageable.
My main grief with combat is the conquest battles. First, sure, they're shitty unorganised melee combat which is a bit jarring. But mostly, they're plain boring since it's just about killing stuff as fast as possible on a stupid flat plain. No playing with the environment/range/stealth means it's a bit of a boring slog. Ship boarding at least has the option to throw overboard, and doesn't overstay its welcome.
So, yes. 'surprisingly pleasant'. It's very cookie cutter and I shouldn't have enjoyed it that much, but somehow, it worked for me. There's enough landscape to walk around in and enough options to wipe out forts that I enjoyed the ride. I don't think I'll ever go back to it once I'm through the DLCs/Lost Tales of Greece, but I did enjoy the time when it wasn't trying to make me care about their modern day storyline.