why is the game starting/loading screen soooooooo long
I have yet to play to the game, waited over 20 minutes and it had not started

I appreciate story summaries, but generic loading screens with advice really need to go away on their own, perhaps with onhover preventing that, just in case the piece of advice is new / long / confusing for a non-native speaker.


General impressions:

Holy [pixelated] cow, the game is awesome. By the screenshots, it does kinda look like a premium mobile game, but as the systems and subsystems unfold, it becomes clear the game is anything but casual. From what I've seen by the first quest, there are:
character leveling (gaining experience)
character building (picking perks - it appears they can be strategically adjusted between battles)
scheduling + relationship building
equipment choices
looting
shopping
crafting
fishing
city development
faction diplomacy
kingdom quests and story quests and optional quests (?)
cutscenes
JRPG-like talking to NPCS
CYOA segments with far-reaching consequences
research and lore
tactical combat
tactical achievements
graph traversal / strategic campaigning

and the kicker: the whole 56-day span during which I'm supposed to engage in most if not all of this bears the name Tutorial, so the content I see is far from everything the game has to offer.

Also: cloud saves work.

This looks very interesting, I might pick this one up next month.

Wow! Thanks for posting your first impressions. I've been on the fence, bu it sounds really good.
Cheers!

Looks fun, definitely going to give a go.

So far it's been a engaging game, very pretty & plenty of humour.
No issues or bugs hit so far, been a smooth ride.
Battles are challenging, characters are distinct, bonus points in battles are tricky to get.
But do reward if the challenge is accepted, more often than not i'd restart the battle to do just that.
Scratched the game so far plenty left to do & see......superb so far.
Any niggle i've had have been said by others so no need to repeat them.

Haksun sounds very much like M'aiq the Liar, same voice actor perhaps....anyway, made me chuckle.
Wish you luck with the game, may your coffers be filled.

Uh, I can't see the hotfix in my library. Maybe tomorrow because it seems that GOG staff doesn't work at weekends.

No, the trick is to keep the messages short and pregnant, that you can easely read them while it's loading, not writing a whole novel on a loading screen. ;)

Long term, it kinda kills these messages when a new hardware fastens up the loading times, though. I have seen the "tips and loading messages zooming so fast I can't read them" problem in several older games

I played a few more hours over the weekend -- still rather enjoying the game. I did a couple of the clearing quests, with more fights. The hit rate seems to be really low. Miss, and then when the enemies dodge sometimes too, it feels even less than the listed 80% (for main character's attacks); frustratingly-so. [I enjoy combat... the miss rate just seems a bit high for 'max fun' is all.]

Couple bugs:
* When starting from Galaxy, after the Unity graphics settings window/clicking "play", the game starts, but you have to click on the icon from the task bar to get it to load. (Windows 8.1)
* The game, while playing full screen at l.east, doesn't appear in the task bar to swap. It only appears in alt-tab menu.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand. This is one I have with pretty much every game: Fishing isn't fun. I'm not sure it can be made fun, because it sure hasn't been in any game I've ever played with it. I sure as hell hope I can complete everything in the game without having to delve into that.

Strange... I was playing a battle and the barbarian woman just... disappeared. I had ended her turn after she pounced, it went to Kay, and I was about to use 'bang' and I heard her killing sound effect, she disappeared. The tree that was in the battle attacked the square she was in, but she didn't get another turn.

Can anyone confirm that you can have the sisters join battle or are they just interactive npc's? :(

Pretty sure they're total NPCs. They get a lot more dialog than other NPCs which you can level up your relationships with. I'm not sure what the reason is. Maybe they'll consider expanding it? They handle administration, so perhaps some kind of diplomacy-related perk would work. Maybe you're already at max level because they're family? X-D

I haven't seen a silhouette in the PC gallery suggesting that the sisters are recruitable.
On the other hand, having purely non-combat characters in that kind of game is a nice change of pace. But it feels weird you can't build your relations with them.