This game needs a lot of work. The biggest issue by far (as we are all here on PC) is the stability of the game. I can play for about 1.5 hours before the game crashes. It does this every single time I play. There hasn't been a game session that has lasted longer than 3 hours for me (and that was REALLY laggy. To the point where I could barely walk straight in game). Then the display driver will inevitably crash, and I'll have to close the game, retart it, and try again. This by itself wouldn't be as bad as it is but the game ALSO crashes the display drivers about 4/5 times on the logo/warning screen upon startup. This is on top of the normal (ha! "Normal") crashes to desktop that occur once every 5-6 hours or so that don't involve the drivers taking a dump. Add to that the bugs. Then add the weird UI choices (vehicles for sale only have pictures in messages, not in the journal where the missions to buy them are, mousing over a target shows EITHER the info OR options for hacking, having to sell/drop useless food items one by one, etc etc). The gameplay loop itself is fun, and the story is fine. Not all of it is great (some characters are written poorly, some options in conversations make no sense for the character, etc), but a majority of the game underneith all the terribleness is a lot of fun. The saddest part is that in about 6 months, this game MIGHT be worth playing. This is a very disappointing release, and I didn't actually have my expectations set too high. Avoid for now at all costs! It will make your hair turn grey.
The first 30 minutes of playing this game, I believed this would be a 10/10 or a 5 star game. I died by turning on a lightbulb in my hotel room. THAT was the RPG stuff I was looking for! A guy who has no idea what reality is, and there may actually be some super natural stuff going on, and this may or may not be reality for the character... man! My brain saw all this potential, and I was so excited! Then I went outside, and started the investigation, flirted with some woman like a brain damaged man out of a coma, laughed at a lot of things, and even helped a young girl get out of the cold by talking to her very strange and superstitious mom inside their bookshop! But that bookshop conversation was the first reveal of the overall problem with this game; dialogue that seems clever, but isn't dialogue. It's just the devs showing you what they think, through long-winded text walls. It seems clever at first (because my god it really is. at first) but after about 2-3 hours of play, everything boils down to "communism, fascism, feminism, capitalism, racism, and sexism." Everything. Literally everything. Every single character, ever internal dialogue, ever choice, boils down to an "ism" of some sort, and the game takes every opportunity to hammer it home, again and again. I don't care what the developers' politcal stances are. It doesn't bother me one way or another, but this is bad writing, and bad story telling. I wanted to know what the "danger" from the north was. I wanted to know why his wife hated him, why his partner was with his ex wife. I wanted to know why he wanted to kill himself, why the dude became a cop, and what his sense of justice really was. I wanted this guy who had no pre-concieved sense of what reality was to be free to understand a perception of reality that only someone like him in his state of mind could comprehend. Instead his stomach tried to convince him to be a fascist, and his muscles tried to convince him to be an ethno-nationalist...
I've played some 130+ hours of this game so far, and I've enjoyed a lot of it. The story isn't bad, the fighting can be fun, the map is fun to explore... the Kingdom/Barony management is fun, though I am unsure as to what effect it really has on the game-world itself. There seems to be a lot of content in the game, and that is great. There are a lot of areas to explore, and even with my amount of hours put in, I am still finding interesting encounters out in the wilds of the Stolen Lands. However, the game is also missing quite a bit. I cannot rely on mercenaries to run things, so hiring adventures and roleplaying them as "old friends" of the main character is out. The portraits the game comes with are very limited (though this can be alleviated by mods). The character models are almost impossible to match to the portraits (with or without mods). You cannot edit your own biography or the biography of your mercenaries... But all of that is small stuff. The big things are the characters not making sense within the story world (such as an open relationship between two former slaves in which one is possessive and yet also.. fine... with the open relationship? What?) And the world itself does not care who your character is beyond limited dialogue choices. For example, I played through a part where a dwarf forge can get destroyed twice; once with a human and once with a dwarf main character. BOTH times, the dialogue options were the same when the forge got destroyed, and BOTH times, the character who did it got off scot-free without a reprimand, despite the destruction being essentially heresy for any dwarf. I have a lot of complaints about this game, but... I also have a lot of fun with it and I've sunk a lot of hours into it. It's worth a play-through, I think. Just don't expect it to blow your mind or keep you riveted like Baldur's Gate or PS:Torment. This is a decent game, but very flawed.
