A bit of research tells me that I personally agree with their lead developer, but I can't blame anyone who embargoes them. After all, the House of Bogus blackballed half the e-commerce world when Ebay and Amazon decided to play favorites with historical memorabilia so any other position would be the pinnacle of hypocrisy on my part. Of course, that kind of thinking is a two way street. Just as I threw a lot of money at crowdfunds, indies, and Chris Roberts in 2012-2014 to give the AAA publishing cartel the double birdie I'm somewhat tempted to buy this out of hand simply to mock the social-media thought police. Alas, my game backlog is quite full right now--largely because I was evidently not the only one who did the double-birdie thing and all those various non-EA/Ubi/Actiblizz projects got real budgets and turned into legitimately good releases--so I'm gonna have to hold off until there's more of an opening.

So early impressions... I like it... a lot.

The game is a lot more "dense" than I thought it would be - lots of neat little crunchy bits with stats, skills and perks. I don't know why but I thought it would be more dumbed down - the character development seems to be like the Elder Scrolls where you bump up your stuff by use. There's a handful of "core" stats and these play into the "secondary" more specific skills. Sort of like Bloodlines, but you level up by use not by assigning points.

Also feels a bit like Gothic in that you suck at the start. You're not a badass, you feel slow ... but manage to bump up Strength or one of the secondary stats and you start to "feel" better. Also REALLY like the early positional targeting. Again, you suck at the start so it doesn't really seem to open up, but I can feel a pretty deep and interesting strategic combat system in there.

The UI is a bit cumbersome (I like that the game spoon feeds you stuff in a tutorial manner, but I miss having a proper paper manual in front of me to read through). A PDF would go a long way to helping this.

Story seems solid - I like that you start out hearing "about" stuff / things / guys. Historical games seem to do this really well - Eisenwald is the one that comes to mind. At first the things going on seem really distant and on the periphery. As the game goes on, I'm sure you really start getting involved and interacting with these powerful events and figures that initially feel so far off.

Looking forward to putting more time into the game!

Hey, I'll gladly settle for some "not quite the latest titles" from Squenix. You know, stuff like Blood Money, Mini Ninjas, Kane & Lynch or Sleeping Dogs - most of them are around 10 years old by now.

However, I'm not seeing it. Squenix love themselves some DRM. And I'm not even talking about DRM in the sense of muh piracy. Squenix are the biggest nannies on the market: If you want to buy Kane & Lynch 2 in Germany, you'll get a low violence version by default. Well, crap, guess I'll have to go abroad and get the uncut version there. Because, it's not like Kane & Lynch 2 is banned by the German authorities, there should be no reason for you not to get this game uncut in another territory. Only, that doesn't work either: "Notice: This version of the game is not playable in Germany." Well, fucking marvellous! How about Sleeping Dogs then? "Notice: This version of the game will only be playable in China, Mongolia, Korea, Taiwan, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Phillipines, Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Hong Kong, and Macau."

This is like that thing the opponents of DRM were talking about!

I don't think Squenix is going to be willing to relinquish this dictatorial amount of total control over the games they sell/rent out by releasing them on gog.

tl;dr: Steam is cancer and Squenix sucks

Criticism on this forum is strictly reserved for the behaviour and games of indie developers, i.e. "parasites", not for the million dollar games financed by and sold through major publishers. If an indie dev misses an update, he must be crucified and GOG must cease to sell their games, announced in a seriously snarky press release, ASAP. If a major publisher releases a bugfest by a developer with serious mommy issues with a two week delay yet still full price on GOG, with substantial pre-order bonus content, nixes a heap of backer rewards, denies backers a DRM free version, thou shalt not say a word. In fact, all that is completely super.

Haven't played it yet, but from what I heard the main problem with this game is the lack of a proper save feature. Quite a number of players have reported that they lost hours of progress because the game crashed on them or bugged out and they were unable to save before that.

Apparently, there is already a mod out there that will let you quicksave. So you might want to install that one before playing.

Well, actually this is also the case.

I agree on opinion. But I won't judge a company on the product alone, I would also by the process involved with it. For instance if the company create pollution or doesn't have an ecofriendly policy, or if the owner has some shady business. So I won't punish opinion, but I find it viable to not financially support someone that create bad conditions for others even if the product is good.

Nice to see such a big and long awaited title being released on GOG.

"Yayyyyyyyy" *flags wave*

I am playing it and find it quite a pleasant experience.
So far I haven't found any gamebreaking or annoying bugs, apart from very weird camera positions in dialogues and a missing image in a tutorial hint...
Savegame system is perfect for me. Probably not for everyone's taste, specially if you can't have much time for playing, but for me that keeps the essence of the game and shouldn't be modded.

Playing it under very high settings and no performance or stability issues so far (Intel i5-7400 @ 3.00 GHz, 16 GB RAM and GeForce GTX 1050)

I did throw one downvote your way, and there was nothing behind it than your general fairfoxiness. Your question may have been valid, but your posts are major pain to decipher, so I usually don't bother reading them at all. Sometimes accompanied by a downvote to hide them from sight, once in a blue moon when I'm in particularly bad mood and your post happens to stand out too much in a discussion I try to read. Once gog implements "hide post without downvote" I may as well start using that instead (wouldn't hold my breath waiting for such feature, though).

Oh no, I'm not trying to get him to change his opinion nor send any kind of message. I simply have no interest in supporting his view. To pick a hyperbolic example, I would never use anything that I knew to be in some way linked to Donald Trump's businesses and would want people to inform me of any links. It's not an attempt to send a message, get him to change his views or punish him. It's simply about disassociating myself from him.

Right. And what I don't know, I can't do anything about. But when I do know, I do not want to be associated with it. That is my right as a consumer and I find it highly surprising that you care so much.

To my phantom repper, here's another one for you.
You support harassment and doxing? Because he does. Either way, it is entirely your right to buy this to "stick it to the thought police" just as it is mine to not support people who support mass harassment campaigns. Thank you for replying civilly instead of anonymously downrepping me (if that's not a perfect example of thought policing, I don't know what is).

It's not that buggy, that has been vastly overblown, it's just your standard open-world glitchiness, roughly on the level of Witcher 3 or Fallout 4 on release. And the next patch is coming this week.

I think PC Gamer did a technical comparison - weirdly the game runs well on low to medium details with average rigs (and still looking great). But on high or even Ultra settings it doesn't run spectacular even on the most powerful rigs.

Just a quick question, but will the pre-order DLC be available for purchase at a later date? I know it wasn't anything big but just a general question is all.

That would be a total dealbreaker for me. I hope that mod is kept well-maintained.

Or the developers add this very basic quality-of-life feature.