Need help fantasy books!

Well, it may be a bit illogical because //Attention! spoiler!//Geralt met many of his friends in later volumes, for example Regis - they met each other in 3rd volume, but at party in Shani's house Jaskier reminded Geralt about his friends: Milva, Cahir, Regis, Angouleme... Moreover, if you played 1st part, you probably would see outro video and noticed that somebody wanted to kill king Foltest, he was as fast as witcher and had shiny eyes ;)

I have never read Eragon, but I have heard some negative comments about it. That it "stole" a lot of elements from other writers and stuff. That combined with the fact that it is too standard fantasy, have never really invited me to read it.

And yes, most Fantasy requires a lot of time to read because more than in any other genre, fantasy tales spans several books. For me, it's one of it's strengths because I love to read and fantasy authors take their time to develop their characters and put a lot of detail in the books. Ofcourse, not everyone shares that opinion. Tons of people I've recommended Robert Jordan too, seemed interested at first but upon hearing that the serie contains 14 books and roughly 15.000 pages, they are like "wtf... I asked you for A book, not a library".
Luckily there are also lots of authors who write books smaller in scale, with only a limited amount of characters so they don't need to spend much time on character development etcetera and can focus more on the story itself. I haven't read any recent fantasy (Rothfuss, Abercrombie) but some of the older and shorter stories: Of Tyrants and Kings, by John Marco (only 3 books of roughly 6-700 pages each), Monarchies of God, by Paul Kearney (5 books of roughly 300 pages each).

And a good fantasy story is one that keeps you wondering what will happen. Not necessarily on the next page because it is obvious that every book/serie that is so "epic"/grand has it's lulls and even some boring chapters, but just the story in general. Some of the best fantasy books I've read have an obvious ending, one that you know since halfway through book 1 (this guy will die at the end of the series, for example), yet the story was so gripping, so exciting, I just wanted to know and read every step of that character until his doom.

Anyway, long story short, if starting with Jordan/Martin/Erikson is a bit daunting because of the sheer scope of their stories, you might wanna try out the following first, I've all liked them a lot as well and they are easier and faster (!) to digest than the afore mentioned:

John Marco - Of Tyrants and Kings
Paul Kearney - Monarchies of God
Terry Brooks - The Shannara Trilogy (much older, already from the beginning of the eighties, so much more Tolkien-focused, but still a good read!)

It took off for me. First 50 pages went slowly, the first book took me around 2 weeks. The second one (1000 pages) was finished under a week.