I'm not a tester. I don't need to have a version number ALWAYS onscreen with absolutely zero way to remove it. Dave the Diver, Slay the Spire, even Baldur's Gate 3. Why does every game released in the past five years just leave the version number onscreen during gameplay? I didn't sign up for early access. I am not a tester. I do not want this and I will refund any game with this aspect. There is also no obvious way to turn off Steel Series mouse illumination, even though I have illumination disabled in every profile I have for my mouse. Terraria also did this, but at least there you could edit a text file to disable it. But here again, it's external to the game itself. Why? What justification could there possibly be to override MY preferences on MY computer??
This and Saints Row 4 crash in ways that make it impossible for me to kill the process without logging out of my computer or hard rebooting. Do not buy this broken trash.
I buy games on GoG specifically to avoid data collection practices. Larian explicitly compel the user to share their gameplay and usage without a choice to opt-out. As progressive as Larian have been regarding distasteful "games-as-a-live-service" practices common in the industry, forcing me to participate in focus testing and analytics seems antithetical. I didn't buy in for early access because I am not a beta tester. I don't need another corporation havesting data when I specifically wish to play solo offline. At the very least, Larian could give us the option not to participate. In the meantime, I'm running this sandboxed to keep it from unauthorized sharing of my data. I will ammend my review if ever this data policy changes.
This game gives you many tools to solve the problems it presents to you. Then, it punishes you for trying to use the wrong tools when it gives you no prompt for its own expectations. You play the game the way the game wants, not the way you want. Nevermind the numerous egregious bugs, the game's jobs are just poorly written. You don't get any foresight into how the writers expect you to complete a job until the job is committed and you simply can not progress because you don't have points in a specific build. You don't get to find your own way to solve quest problems. This game was marketed for giving the player freedom of choice, but it does not allow you to approach missions the way you would like to solve them. Do it exactly as written, or, in most cases, you can't do it at all. Nevermind doing a job in a less than ideal manner. Often, you just don't get to do the mission if you aren't built properly. Not "do the mission, but there are frustrating consequences". More like "do sidejobs until you cave and add points where we believe they should be". Everything about this game promotes save scumming and external modding while forcing a railroaded, linear path forward. Female Streetkid Engineer or Male Corpo Samurai, those are pretty much the only options the writers considered viable.
