You can spend enormous amounts of time on non fighting quests. And some of the fighting quests can be worked around with high speech or threat.

I spend an embarrassing amount of time wandering around in between towns as well as playing dice.

Fighting can be clunky and hard but it's over pretty fast, and there's something very realistic about things. It's no FPS, I'm not a fan of those.

After you get your combat skill levels high the rest of the game is a charming gambol through the woods with no real challenge, even for a slow twitcher like me. The fox potion reduces the grinding by half.