Finally. FINALLY. For years, YEARS, I have said I would buy skyrim when it went on Gog. I don't like DRM. I don't like Steam. I wanted it on gog. I wanted it without DRM. It. FINALLY. Happened. LETS GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.
You're probably like me, one of the millions who watched Edgerunners and said "oh shit. I wanna jack into the matrix now." and went to check on Cyberpunk2077. You probably saw all the talk about the poor release, with thousands of bugs when it released in 2020, and you probably saw Keanu Reeves go on stage talking about it. Well, it's all still valid. CP2077 is absolutely RIDDLED with flaws and bugs, an entire two years later it has had almost no support. It's actually kind of amazing how bad this title is. I played it for about 5 hours of the weekend I owned it, and spent a good 12 hours just searching up bug fixes for the audio crackle issue, an issue so bad that it has it's own support page that suggests you LOWER YOUR AUDIO QUALITY. There is no other known fix, and this isn't guaranteed to work. Some people have had the crackling stop at 96000 khz, others 48000. I'm one of the ones it never went away for. The game itself wasn't lagging, my hardwares solid, even on psycho I had a constant 35fps. But every time a firefight broke out, the audio crackled and I thought my damn speakers broke. NPC's walked into me while I was standing still and then reported assault to the cops, so I suddenly got attacked. NPC Collision just has issues. I watched an NPC stand up, bug out and fall off a ledge, die, and then I suddenly had a murder charge. I was standing on the clear other side of the building. Wasn't even interacting with me, it was a random nameless NPC who was chatting with another NPC and finished it's scripted dialogue then was going to go off on it's predetermined path. Gunplay is okay, melee combat is... Wonky is the only way to describe it. Hacking sits somewhere in between. Visuals were fine, I never turned them down below Psycho so I don't know how it looks on a potato. All three origins have the same edgelord personality and story. But hey, at least at character creation I can choose from a vagina and TWO differnet dicks, then determine my dick size.
You may pick this up expecting to play Pathfinder on your laptop, I recommend you don't. Pathfinder Kingmaker is... Flawed. There are NUMEROUS significant issues with the game that will irk longtime fans of PF, and leave new players pulling their hair out. The story is solid, we'll get that out of the way now, but most everything else suffers from some astounding development decisions. First, the characters. Your party is made of you and up to 5 other NPC's you'll recruit throughout the game. Each of them is terrible. They are class locked from a base level of 3 into a class and subclass, and you cannot change it. Some of their decisions are downright terrible. Not a single one of them is a well built character that can pull it's own weight. You can hire mercs, all of which are lower level than you. By A LOT. Second is the balance. The developers have no concept of difficulty scaling, and it shows. The first chapter of the game has you go on a short (90 days in game) campaign to kill a tyrant in a forest, and for succeeding you get the land. The final boss is a level 4 encounter, and you can take his encounter (him and about 40 goons) at level 2 if you're smart. On the other hand, in the level 1 Kobold mine are webs that will shut down your entire party because they are coded to become a permanent part of the background and can't be burned away. Get stuck in some at any character level, just altF4 and start a new game. The web does not ever go away, and if even ONE part member is stuck in it, you're not able to move to the next area. You also level FAR slower than in any RPG I've ever seen, that includes actual pathfinder, and half of the spells are broken (see invisibility does not work, for example). The game isn't difficult, it's tedious. Some of this is fixed with mods, most isn't. You can download a mod to reclass NPC's, get more exp, fix a handful of spells, so on so forth. But that is something you expect from Bethesda. Avoid unless the devs fix it.
There's about 100 other reviews that hit the nail on the head, so I'm just going to add my two cents and dip out. I'm waiting on my refund now, because this is legally false advertising. Larian advertised an EARLY ACCESS TITLE, meaning a FINISHED game that is ready for release, and well past the stages of beta testing. That is NOT what this title is. BG3 is riddled with bugs, glitches, astoundingly bad coding and optimization, and that's before we get to the fact that more than 70% of the advertised features ARE DISABLED DURING EARLY ACCESS. Holy shit, this even beat out Beamdog for "how to piss all over your audience". - Saves are bugged and crash when you try to load them. Auto save, manual save, doesn't matter, if you EVER turn your game off, you are starting over from character creation, because you will not be able to load that save. - The mouse pointer isn't even coded right, I regularly have to point about 2 centemeters (I FUCKING MEASURED IT) to the RIGHT of anything to interact with it, and that's before the issues with the buggy controls. - Pathing is utterly borked, I've clicked an area then watched my entire party run INTO fire, then turn around and run out, then back into it, while the pathing line shows them walking AROUND the fire. - Visual glitches abound. Characters sometimes have fully functioning faces that show great expression, or they talk and their head physically freezes in one space, separates from their necks, and then crashes the game on you. Fire is often about 3 steps off where it visually appears to be, bodies ragdoll then expand to block the screen, and loading anything, EVEN QUICK TRAVEL, causes a black screen and crashes the game. Don't even pre order this. This THING is spitting in the face of customers, and we should never be okay with it. You advertise a finished game, it better be FINISHED, not a LITERAL BETA TEST. Honestly, I'm not even sure I'm going to buy this game when the full release comes, I'm so tired of this shit.
