After playing a bit of Gwent, I was keen to enjoy some adventure using the same mechanics, and Thronebreaker looked to be a beautifully crafted game. From the start it racked up one disappointment after another. The efforts to create a beautiful rendering of the world of the witcher was overwhelmed by sluggish controls and bad game design. The UI is outright frustrating. CDPR has experience making a polished one in Gwent, but somehow it's just terrible in Thronebreaker. Interactions are slow. When you repeat battles (which you will need to do, a lot, as some rely on simply drawing the right cards to start with) characters repeat their lines (fun on the first go, but when you've heard them repeat themslves for the 10th time it's tempting to put your laptop through the window). Exploration in the game is rather tedious, involving simply walking over every possible inch of ground to find the 'secrets' (boring wood/gold items lying on the floor), and infuriating when you reach the end of a chapter, to be told you have missed some items. Great, time to go back and find them. Half an hour later, with nothing turning up, the internet kindly informs you that actually you can't even get those items unless you approached some of the scenarios in exactly the right way. Sadly, they could have fixed many of these frustations with barely hours of extra effort put in to development, which indicates that someone just doesn't care, and this was rushed for a quick cash grab using the IP. This stinks of a game without much thought put in to it, and very little quality assessment done. It feels rushed, irritating, and tarnishes the reputation of CDPR for me. It feels like a job to finish it, merely to pick up some of the collectibls for Gwent. And in turn, with this game being a disaster, it demeans Gwent and every other CDPR game in turn. Outright stupid business decision to not put more effort in to this one. I am sorely tempted to go elsewhere.
Until now I have exclusively bought games on steam. The DRM free attitude that CD Project is taking has converted me =) Steam is amazing, but GOG has kicked it up a notch. Pity that many old games on GOG are relatively expensive for their age.
