When Obsidian decided years ago to make panning the camera in 'strategy' mode and rotating the camera in 'exploration' mode share a keybind and thus leave no keybind for rotating the camera in 'strategy' mode or pan it in 'exploration mode... That was bad enough. The fact that someone at Aspyr then looked at this mess and went "that's fine, we don't need to fix it" just blows my mind... And to then have the gall to claim they've fixed the camera... No, you didn't, you didn't even try! What they HAVE done is give it a minor facelift and scale the UI to make it usable on 4k, which is welcome, but not enough. FIX THE DAMN CAMERA CONTROLS!
Took some fiddling with the options and a third party tool (lossless scaling) to get it running on a modern resolution because the ingame resolution setting doesn't seem to do anything, but beyond that it's still the old classic and it's still fun
Clunky controls and UI, no journal, no map,...
I don't know if I'm even an hour in and I've already run into 4 separate bugs. 1.I put it in borderless window full screen and it just decided to cap my fps at 60, which is half my refresh rate. 2.Worse still, on top of that while playing in borderless the load screens were taking excessively long times with over a minute to switch areas. 3.Dialogue subtitles will get stuck on a line while the conversation moves past it or even cut out entirely 4.I agreed to escort a bunch of people to some settlement, before the lead guy proceeded to get stuck on a bump in the road So he's just walking in place and since there's no collision detection, I can't even push him around it Unbelievable
I'm 9 hours in and the combat got old ~4 hours ago. And there's just so much of it! You'd think after the 150th jackass who I beat the snot out of within 2 days of arriving in the city, word would get around, but no! Everyone wants to pick a fight with me. Every single mission, no matter how small has 2+ occasions where a group of presumed locals who can't pick an accent decide to force me into this pokemon-like battle and despite my character being advertised as capable of influencing people, there doesn't seem to be a single opportunity to talk your way out of violence. Its main gimmick outside combat, the clue and conclusion system, got old even quicker. You just walk around spamming RT until something lights up in red, press A, optionally read some fluff text and repeat a bunch of times until a conclusion pops up. And I'm not using controller inputs by accident here, the game was clearly made for console and it feels very clunky and uncomfortable with kb/m. The camera also sucks, player isn't given control of it for no discernable reason and half the time you're ose to a wall you can't see anything. It's a shame, because the aesthetic, particularly during salutor fights, is very cool and the world and story seem interesting, but I just can't bring myself to trudge through the more of its gameplay to explore more of its strong points
Fantastic and innovative setting, enjoyable story, cool character progression and fun combat or skill-based pacifist options for the player to choose from, what's not to love? Apart from some minor pathing hiccups every now and then, no technical issues whatsoever either. It's hard to find much to complain about. The companions are few and not particularly memorable and the last chapter (more of an epilogue really), while still enjoyable narratively, was a bit light on actual gameplay.
They released this bugged to hell and to add insult to injury they refuse to put the patch notes on GoG because apparently we're second class players to Owlcat... Probably don't even read the bug reports GoG players send it...
It's littered with traps that will murder you, meaning you should always be in trapfinding mode, but that mode makes you move so painfully slowly, it makes the entire game literally unplayable. What awful, stupid design decision. Respect the players' time ffs!
The previous game I had to lower ingame resolution from 4k to 1440p because otherwise the game chopped off text. Now on this one I have to lower the resolution for the entire system from windows settings, because the stupid game is alergic to scaling and hides UI elements! Incredible how it gets worse... Apart from that, they dumped the previous games' main character and voice actor and replaced them with much worse and they made the character progression system worse
First off, it's a glitchy mess. I've had numerous random CTDs, getting stuck in doorways and scenery, falling through the floor, grapical glitches, audio glitches, the healer companion being rendered entirely useless due to the fact she simply doesn't heal and one damn near gamebreaker where completing Maracay quests in the 'wrong' order screws up the main island arc, forcing a nigh impossible fight to continue the plot. Second big issue is the combat. 1 on 1 fencing can be alright after you get a hang of it and even somewhat fun if still clunky and flawed after your character picks up a few skills. But fighting critters and any combat against multiple opponents is the worst experience I can ever recall having in a game, in part due to the inherent clunkiness, but much more because of the horrendous soft target lock having a useless mind of its own and also because for some nonsensical reason they decided to put jump, combat roll and kick all on the same goddamned keybind! If you can get past that and a few smaller issues (such as it being a pirate game with no ship battles, not being much of a looker, console UI, goddamned quicktime events that kill), there's a lot to like - the voice acting is good to great, the characters are fun, the story is alright, dialogues and writing in general are better than PB's later offerings and the character progression system is not only the best in a PB game, it's best in class.
