I took a few days off and managed to finish a game in that time (main plot + side quests), which took me ~45 Hrs. I was playing on PS5, so graphics & performance was decent (Full HD). Game crashed 'only' every 2-3 hours, but thanks to good autosave it was mostly a small nuisance. During my playthrough, I've encountered a dozen of not 'game-breaking' bugs and 2 that forced me to reload (e.g. textures didn't load at all). What I liked: - Story & Characters - Graphics (vistas, cars, lightning) - Side Quests - Sniper Rifles (some of them are OP) - Skills - I liked the options for ppl who are not so good with gamepad - Texting between quests - nicely done What I disliked - Amount of bugs & glitches - Driving cars (most of them) - City feels empty after a while - 'Filler' activities get boring quickly - Gangs don't matter outside from the main story - Button mapping is strange - Enemy AI is flat-out stupid Technical Rant I don't understand why CD Project RED insist on developing the REDengine - especially as I see similar bugs as in Witcher 3. Modernizing engine for 1-2 projects doesn't seem that plausible to me and using something like Unreal Engine 4 could save a lot of development time for 'only' 5% of profits. PS4 version is very bad on pretty much any PS4 - only runs great on PS5. Do not buy a console version unless you have the newest generation console. Final Thoughts The main story is definitely shorter than Witcher 3. Took me ~45 Hrs without rushing and doing some side-quests & 'cleaning' streets of thugs. I don't regret buying the game for 55£ (Amazon UK special edition) as the main story made it worth for me - really liked some of the characters. This could be a 'legendary gem', but something went awfully wrong in the project management and we ended up with an unpolished diamond. Game breaking bugs will be fixed, but some of the aspects are deeply ingrained into this project and will need massive (Witcher 3 DLC like) updates to address the issues. These problems are: the city feels empty, Enemy AI, not much to do outside of quests, no interaction with NPCs.
I\ve read a few reviews before I bought the game and turned out they were a bit wrong. If you loved Baldur's Gate I or BGII you will love this game also. It is really scratching that feeling of venturing the wilds like BGI, while also having similar quirks of Dungeon & Dragons system. I am sure that many D&D fans are used to the fact that the best part of fights in this kind of games are cheesing them (using specific mechanics to "break them" in a way) and this game has a lot of that :D. The Pathfinder rules which are translated quite faithfully from the rulebook are sometimes a bit of a burden like for example there is soo many types of weapons that it's very hard to find a meaningful upgrade for the one you need (that is a problem when you have a specific talent). The combat system could be seen as complicated by newcomers, but I remember Baldur's Gate to be Stupidly "brutal" in the beginning as well. Once you adjust to the system and to the fact that this is not a Hack&Slash type of game you will start to enjoy it tremendously. Story-wise I really appreciate what Owlcat studio has done, a story is simple to follow yet rich in details and unexpected turns. It is a mix of Game of Thrones + BGI venturing the old ruins + a bit of typical D&D old-fashioned adventure. Also worth noting the fact that the game is very looong and if you take your sweet time enjoying it or trying to pursue every interesting choice or build it is absolutely MASSIVE (there is a lot of RPG and kingdom related choices for Good and Evil characters). Please mind the fact that the game was made by the smaller publisher and mostly kickstarted so with the game of this scale it was bound to have some rough start (bugs) but as of today I didn't encounter any game breaking bugs and game is getting a steady amount of fixes from the developer.
