I spent 12h playing, wondering whether it was wasted. The game has too many things to take care of (I may be a control freak, though). Inventory (no stash yet, only expensive backpacks), approval of you party members, gift mechanism, choices (this is of course at the heart of a RPG, so not so much a problem). Combat mechanism: ARPG with pause (some people seem to know the game enough and be quick enough to play without pause), where you control a team of 4 (why not 6 by the way or even 8?). Control is supported by a rule-based system : you can edit complex rules that the AI will use to take control of the party members (even the main player). However, you don't have enough slots (around 5, more by spending leveling points). Nevertheless, when your choice of rules (i.e., programming robots) come to a hole, your party members run like chicken here and there, and area magic becomes inapplicable. Of course I may have not played enough to fully appreciate the model, but this is a matter of choice of gameplay; I preferred to invest points in Intelligence for a mage or strength for a warrior, and disable the automatic control. Then it becomes a feast of pauses during combats (e.g. to prevent the warrior to nevertheless run into combat while the fireball is being cast). Then you also have to fully understand the skills of everyone. This quickly ruins some of the fun. Party management: morale+gift to balance the effects of certain choices. (not enough room here to expand). Do you need, for completing the game to nurture all you 5-10 potential party members or can you take care of only 3 at the risk that your progression will be blocked. You get the point: when engaging in a 60-90 hours of gameplay, you would like to get some reassurance that time will not be wasted. Bugs: random crashes while playing on Windows 10. Changed parameters, affinity set to 1, to finally no avail. My last save does not reload, and do not want to waste more time with support (if any).
I bought the game recently, after very much enjoying the 3rd installment (Wild Hunt+DLCs). Huge disappointment, as the gameplay is very "heavy" (combat, movement) and very constrained (I was expecting some kind of open world). Also, playing with a controller is far from easy; inventory is a mess; drinking a potion requires at least 6 buttons pressed; radial menu is painful. It even features QTEs!
I bought this game recently, benefiting from all the time that has passed since its launch - (almost) no bug, DLCs are included, etc. I support most/all the past positive reviews, I am happy not to have purchased at the time it was launched (seemed very buggy/not completed yet). Now this game is a wonderful experience all along, gameplay is excellent, story is very good (difficult to gasp at the beginning if you don't know the backstory, but fine after a couple of hours). NG+ is not really usefull (200h-long play for a completionist, who wants to do that again?) One "bug" that has not been fixed [SPOILER]: there is ONE gwent card you can't get if you choose to follow a quest and make the wrong choice during that quest. Keyword "Olivier". Also I believe they could have added a gwent-vendor-locator-magic-artifact when you complete the main story.
I have got this game at a 50% discount, after having been tempted by the looks, positive reviews and... the discount. Besides not being a great fan for so-called role-playing-open-word-craft-this-story-rich games, this one looked that it could be a rewarding experience. After 3 hours, I am ready to give up. There are a lot of positives for those who like this kind of games (beautiful large word, exploration seems to be rewarded, role playing with only one unattractive, blunt and stupid character), however the negatives I have encountered are a show-stopper: - melee combat (the only kind you get at the beginning) is slow (OK for axes) and very imprecise - dialogs seem to give choice but are ill-conceived (you discover a body, go to the dead man's friend with no new dialog option until you report to the quest giver to report; then the new option opens). - more than once, I wanted to get more information on a follow-up quest, thus chose a line of dialog. Bam! this line closed a chance to follow-up that quest. At this point I wanted to get more information on the game before spending more time in it: reading reviews I then discovered that you can't complete the game without joining a faction [Bersekers, Outlaws, Clerics]. I would have thought you could play the game as a "free-lance". No faction is really attractive from a story point of view (sure, you can get your upgrades). So... bye Elex. Last : 50$/€ is definitively too high a price. Wait for a large discount.
