Hah, I was feeling the exact same way when playing that W3 quest. I was so eager to push through to the end because I was getting so bored that I wasn’t even sure what really happened in there. I hate filler combat, even if the combat mechanics are mostly enjoyable. Personally I enjoy quick, highly lethal combat and highly dislike damage-sponge enemies and bosses. Most of these are only difficult since they take so damn long because your super lethal weapon suddenly deals proportionally as much damage as a soggy baguette. I’m totally over loot now as well. There is so much of it in games now that it’s a tyranny of choice. As someone who’s not a min-maxer, I don’t even worry about it anymore. I just pick what looks nice and has good enough stats (Which may be the cause of my troubles above as well!).
I do like exploring a lot, but I don’t like to do it in dungeons much since the exploration there is often sealed behind or followed by combat “walls”. And it only prolongs my time in the dungeon! I much prefer wandering around and exploring the open world.
A lot of games these days, like Mass Effect 3 and Dragon Age: Origins, felt like Wandering in the Dark stretched out over 40 hours to me. In terms of main game and story length I personally think 15-20 hours is the sweet spot, with maybe 10 hours of optional extra content. I honestly don’t have time for more than that these days. Single main-story quests should be somewhere between 20-60 min in my opinion. Enough time to develop a story beat, but not too time consuming. It also gives you some extra time for side-questing, inventory management and non-story exploration in a gaming session (assuming a gaming session of 60-90 min or so).
It’s worth pointing out that a 10 hour season of Game of Thrones easily has more a more complete, complex story than a game twice the length. And even a single season is difficult enough to binge watch. Although, of course, Game of Thrones has no gameplay - but to counterbalance that, it does have multiple different story threads going on at once.