We think of EA or Ubisoft as one of those "Big Publishers" but they're only big in the amount of people they employ and the money they dump into their AAA(A++) games in a select few franchises. That's how they suddenly ended up owning both stuff like Gothic and Darksiders and Red Faction and Desperados. They're just one of the many labels under the Embracer group that owns a shitload of IP they bought from other dead publishers.
It's not like THQN has any kind of brand or style or identity (other than maybe nostalgia IP). I only partially build into one of them and the last hour of the game was terrible. There is a really stupid design choice at the end that makes two builds able to feasibly finish the game without cheating. Magic may seem bad at first but is amazing and can help get past these difficulty spikes. The game does have legit difficulty spikes around the mid-point. I feel the need to mention three major things.
Feel free to experiment and learn from your experiences. Find quests that you can do and kill what you can. The game will also seem absurdly hard at first, this just means you aren't ready to fight what you are yet. Especially now that they got the Steam version patched to run out of the box.
I think my first playthrough was around 80-90 hours. The only major drawback is that the game is long, especially if you do the DLC. If you've played Fable 2, the combat feels somewhat similar to that. I love the emphasis on Fae rather than the standard fantasy antagonists. Kingdoms of Amalur is a really fun game and it does some neat stuff with the setting.