I've played just about every game mentiioned above (to a greater or lesser extent), and just about every one is worth playing depending on your tastes and interests (except perhaps the Gothic games--while I like the basic concepts, I found the control system too odd and nonintuitive to be any fun). My favorites of the games mentioned would probably be The Witcher and Kings Bounty. But, to be frank, the OP noted that he couldn't deal with travel times or even running around cities in KotOR. Since my main criticism of most Bioware games is the limited size of their locations and world, I wonder how you'll like just about any of the games mentioned above, since they all require at least as much running around as KotOR (Bioware's own Mass Affect) and most require a whole lot more. (BTW, I really wish the dev teams of Bioware and Bethesda could get together. Bioware produces amazing plots, athmosphere, and characterizations, but often a smallish world size broken up into fairly limiting locations, while Bethesda (Oblivion, Fallout 3) produces amazingly large and interesting open ended worlds, but tends to fall down on plot and characterization. A combination of the two could be one heckuva game.)
BTW, the OP noted that he is tired of travel times from MMOs. As a veteran of a dozen or so MMOs, starting with original EQ ten(!) years ago, I'm wondering which MMOs he's played. Especially since WoW, I'd regard travel times in MMOs to be sort of a joke. I'm guessing the OP never played original, non-expansion EQ. Especially at low levels (before players had easier access to druid/wizard ports, let alone the various fast travel shortcuts introduced in later years), travel was for the hardcore. Assuming the boats had not been knocked out by a bug (not uncommon), you might spend a half hour twiddling your thumbs at the dock waiting for a boat (a smart player practiced his fishing skill) that took another 20-30 minutes to reach its desination (complete with the small chance that a couple of different bugs might cause your body and all your gear to end up on the bottom of the ocean, from which you'd have to recover it). And that's just one example. We were in their world then, and we loved it. Since WoW, MMOs are for wimps who have actual lives and such 