Ok, so this game is L O N G, 95 hours and still not finished. It is a good game, nothing you have not seen before, except for the kingdom management stuff which is their original bit. Now for the criticism: the characters are a bit contrived - the shouty barbarian, the annoying halfling bard... - and the dialogues are quite basic. The romance dialogues in particular are cringe inducing - don't try them at home, you are bound to get sorely disappointed! Really, only one black character??? And not even romanceable. There are more green than brown people in the game. Another aspect which is quite irritating is that if you don't do certain quests in a particular order, you can get locked out of important bits and even companions. That is quite annoying as you have to google stuff every now and then to make sure you will not miss out on anything important, which risks spoiling the experience. Also, the areas are not marked by level so you might go in thinking you got this and halfway through run into a very high level baddie which has you going back to an earlier save (Lonely Barrow I am looking at you!). However, you have to commend the team of Owlcat Games for the huge effort and achievement. Don't kid yourself, regardless of any issues this game has, if you are a fan of isometric RPGs a la Baldur's Gate, you should play this.
Consider this game as early access. It still has lots of immersion breaking bugs which are annoying, such as weird body motions and positions, and twins and triplets walking the streets... but the game is otherwise playable. In 30 years of gaming I have never seen such a thing, it is embarrasing for the people who made the Witcher franchise - some very bad decisions by the 'corpos' of CD Projekt Red there. Some comments about a couple of things that really bug me: I don't understand why there is no 3rd person view after all that character customisation...yeah there is a mod but it is far from perfect. There is no much room for character roleplay. V is V, no matter your background you will talk and think like the same kind of person, perhaps more suited for a streetkid background. The origins don't really change anything and only the nomad one has some kind of decent lenght. The corpo origin is really bad, and there is nothing in V's character that says corpo at all. Also, the sex is aimed at a male player/gaze - male prostitutes are clearly gay, for example... As a female player I find this annoying - 2021 and still no thought to straight female players. In sum, a work in progress. One day it will be a 4 star game, but not yet. In the meantime, get it on a big discount.
