If the game crashes upon starting a new game and you have a high refresh rate monitor, install the High Refresh Rate Fix mod. If the game crashes after the intro train, install Buffout 4, including its prerequisities, but not F4SE since Fallout London already comes with that. These really should have been included considering the high rate of reported crashes in these two areas, but its worth the effort to fix it yourself to experience such an incredible total conversion. I'm not very far into it but already I can tell that the effort and artistic vision put into this mod far outclasses anything Bethesda can do.
so it's a city builder with roguelike elements. In order to win each city, you must complete randomly selected tasks. Your ability to complete these tasks is dependant on randomly spawning resources, and picking from random building blueprints. Completing tasks fills a completion bar that can also be filled by meeting luxury needs of your citizens. UNFORTUNATELY, there are "boss fight" type cities in which you can't just fill the bar by meeting luxury needs; you must complete specific, particularly difficult tasks. It is impossible to know what these tasks will be in advance. Therefore, it is impossible to actually strategize. This in addition to having to guess which buildings you may or may not need in the future, to not knowing what resources you will randomly find, makes it very easy to end up in a situation where you literally cannot complete any of the tasks. My current save file for a boss city is softlocked, where I must complete one of the following: A) increase morale of citizens using goods that I never got the blueprints to produce B) Find 4 extremely rare artifacts that only spawn in areas of which there are a finite amount, and which I have yet to find a single one, and I'm going to run out of time before I will even be able to explore any more, C) engage with a mechanic that I am flat-out not allowed to use because I have not unlocked the technology to enable it in my home base, which can only be done outside of active runs. Lacking any sort of mitigation for bad rng with the potential to make runs impossible, and especially requiring an out-of-game upgrade that the player has not unlocked yet, is INCREDIBLY slipshod and thoughtless game design. The game pretends you have some ability to succeed with strategic choices but in the end your ability to complete tasks is really just the result of a slot machine.
Obviously I can't speak for anyone else but I haven't encountered any crashes, and performance has been absolutely flawless for me. The graphics are absolutely beautiful. I haven't felt too challenged, I will admit that the game perhaps doesn't do the best job of explaining how it's mechanics are supposed to be used, but nothing has been so esoteric that I haven't been able to figure it out yet. I have seen reviews both saying that it is too easy and that it is too hard, so obviously your experience will depend on you. There hasn't been anything with wrong enough with this game to prevent me from having a great time. Get it on sale if you are unsure, but whatever you do, don't miss out on this experience just because you think it's some sort of bug-ridden incomplete product, it absolutely isn't.
I don't know how this game has earned so much good press. Maybe the original dream is somehow still keeping people's hype going, even after all these years. Maybe it's just the sunk cost fallacy. Either way, the huge amount of updates this game has received have all done nothing to actually make it a good game. I saw a few people complaining that apparently the last few updates before the most recent one were just bug fixes and quality of life things, and all I can say to that is, there should have been way, WAY more of those bug fixing updates before they added any more new stuff. This game is BUSTED, I'm talking bethesda at launch levels of busted. All the new exciting additions have been piled on top of a foundation that is barely holding together. From the game crashing when you take a screenshot with it's own built in photo mode, to everything on the planets clipping into each other, to systems feeling like sloppy first-draft versions of themselves. Perfect anecdote of how scuffed this game is. I once completed a quest, which was already riddled with bugs and oversights, then took another of the same kind of quest. Instead of actually starting a new quest, it put the marker back on the exact same location as the first one. I went there thinking, well, I guess that's the closest area designated for that kind of quest, I guess it'll all respawn and I'll do it again. But no, the area was completely empty, all cleared out by me, from when I did the first quest. Even bethesda games don't fuck up like that; when preston garvey gives you another settlement quest at the very least the game spawns more enemies when if he sends you back to the same settlement, so you actually have a quest objective to complete. But no, this game will just..... put a quest marker back at the same place you just were, giving you a broken unbeatable quest with no objective. TL;DR The game is bad and broken, the updates have done nothing to fix the fundamental flaws
The technical issues with this game go beyond being "janky". I paused the game to do some housework, and when returning the game had crashed to such an extent that not only did ctrl-alt-del not work, but neither did ctrl-shift-esc, win-ctrl-shift-b, or any other key combination. Considering that my mouse also did not respond, it seems like my entire operating system had been broken to such an extent that input devices were disabled. All this to say that this game has serious technical problems that I think probably neither the developers or the community are even aware of, and the fact that they are undocumented makes playing this game before they have been identified and fixed particularly dangerous.
I don't recommend playing this if you haven't played the original, as it absolutely does not convey the same atmosphere. While it is of course nice to explore the environment with updated graphics and see what some of the difficult-to-parse objects in the original really are, the cartoony art style misses the point of what made the original so engrossing. The graphics in the original were the best they could do at the time; they weren't trying to make a cartoon world, it was meant to feel immersive, like real life, and almost every creative decision they made was in service of that goal. Originally there wasn't even going to be a save feature, or any music at all. That's why, for example, they used FMV of real people for the characters. I can't imagine if would have really been that expensive to hire actors to perform the, what, five minutes of cutscene footage? Or heck, even just putting in the work to upscale the original footage would have been better than the awful Civ5-looking 3d heads in this version. If you are new to the series, buy Myst: Masterpiece Edition instead, which is also on GOG for a third of the price.
