As the title says, years later, they added a custom launcher that gates from launching the game and requires an external account to launch with no obvious way to skip this step. The launcher is pointless, especially when the game is on a DRM free platform. Thankfully GoG Galaxy 2.0 allows you to roll back a patch, so for now, I will remain on the last actually DRM Free patch. This was done for all three of their largest games, DoS I, DoS II and BG3. I am extremely dissatisfied with this change as it offers nothing to and breaks a promise made to the customer, as much as I love their games and appreciate them as a studio, I cannot support Larian on this.
As the title says, years later, they added a custom launcher that gates from launching the game and requires an external account to launch with no obvious way to skip this step. The launcher is pointless, especially when the game is on a DRM free platform. Thankfully GoG Galaxy 2.0 allows you to roll back a patch, so for now, I will remain on the last actually DRM Free patch. This was done for all three of their largest games, DoS I, DoS II and BG3. I am extremely dissatisfied with this change as it offers nothing to and breaks a promise made to the customer, as much as I love their games and appreciate them as a studio, I cannot support Larian on this.
As the title says, years later, they added a custom launcher that gates from launching the game and requires an external account to launch with no obvious way to skip this step. The launcher is pointless, especially when the game is on a DRM free platform. Thankfully GoG Galaxy 2.0 allows you to roll back a patch, so for now, I will remain on the last actually DRM Free patch. This was done for all three of their largest games, DoS I, DoS II and BG3. I am extremely dissatisfied with this change as it offers nothing to and breaks a promise made to the customer, as much as I love their games and appreciate them as a studio, I cannot support Larian on this.
As the title says, years later, they added a custom launcher that gates from launching the game and requires an external account to launch with no obvious way to skip this step. The launcher is pointless, especially when the game is on a DRM free platform. Thankfully GoG Galaxy 2.0 allows you to roll back a patch, so for now, I will remain on the last actually DRM Free patch. This was done for all three of their largest games, DoS I, DoS II and BG3. I am extremely dissatisfied with this change as it offers nothing to and breaks a promise made to the customer, as much as I love their games and appreciate them as a studio, I cannot support Larian on this.
As the title says, years later, they added a custom launcher that gates from launching the game and requires an external account to launch with no obvious way to skip this step. The launcher is pointless, especially when the game is on a DRM free platform. Thankfully GoG Galaxy 2.0 allows you to roll back a patch, so for now, I will remain on the last actually DRM Free patch. This was done for all three of their largest games, DoS I, DoS II and BG3. I am extremely dissatisfied with this change as it offers nothing to and breaks a promise made to the customer, as much as I love their games and appreciate them as a studio, I cannot support Larian on this.
As the title says, years later, they added a custom launcher that gates from launching the game and requires an external account to launch with no obvious way to skip this step. The launcher is pointless, especially when the game is on a DRM free platform. Thankfully GoG Galaxy 2.0 allows you to roll back a patch, so for now, I will remain on the last actually DRM Free patch. This was done for all three of their largest games, DoS I, DoS II and BG3. I am extremely dissatisfied with this change as it offers nothing to and breaks a promise made to the customer, as much as I love their games and appreciate them as a studio, I cannot support Larian on this.
I picked this game up due the praise it gets for it's primary theme. The idea of revealing the past using artifacts and translating a lost and forgotten language combined with a current and active mystery thrown in sounds great, and it is, except when you have to play the game... The most polished and functional thing in the entire game is the timeline screen that has a timeline of the past 4000+ years that gets filled with events as you discover more of the past, it is a really fitting and cool concept, but even that screen has UX and technical problems, and that's as good as it gets. Here are some game design sins this game commits: - Slow walking speed combined with invisible walls and no strict paths. - A lot of story and exposition is done via text on the screen, that moves from side to side as the camera moves, while "gameplay" is happening. - You get two options during conversation, sometimes they are just "Option" and "Option?" with no context or tone, might as well flip a coin. - Randomly generated overworld events that can occur while traveling, but you can only find out if you open your map every 10 or 15 seconds to see if one is nearby or not (random). - In my case one of those spawned in a path now closed permanently, I reloaded a save, not it didn't spawn. - Story areas with content that get locked off permanently once you leave, no narrative reason, just to screw with you. - Your companions nags you to leave these areas even if you haven't gotten all the artifacts or w/e, the companion has no real reason to do this, no narrative or mechanical reason, just another player-hostile design choice. - Terrible pop-in, some items are visible all the time, others only within 2m of the camera, no rhyme or reason to this, the game still manages to run poorly with an average poly count of < room temp. - All dynamic characters are sprites with 1 animation frame per second or similar, they are pixelated and terrible in one frame, high-res the next.
I have to say, the game keeps you guessing, however, for what else was available in 2004, you can see why this game was not all that well received. It is a great 4 to 5 hour romp and with some friends, you can get a multiplayer game going. Be warned, the shooting is nothing special. I had to a bunch of things to get the game running well however, here are the things I had to do: - Install game from GoG. - Install custom patch 1.4.2.1 (?) - Install dgVoodoo 2 graphics shim and force the game to use DirectX w/ my resolution and high ref. rate in windowed mode. - Go to my graphics control panel (nvidia in my case) and nudge frame-rate and refresh rate settings until the game finally ran above 65 fps. - Edit some ini files and turn mouse smoothing off. - Create new profile and finally enjoy the game. Check out the PCGamingWiki article for the classic XIII game to do most of those listed things. Honestly, with the way the game ends and with how dated movement and shooting (in an FPS) feels, the game is more of a 3.5 imho, keep in mind, there are other issues that play in to this, like an awkward checkpointing system and buggy audio from some "cut scenes". Honestly, this game was intended to have a sequel and it deserves one too. All of it's issues are technical and some game-feel, both thing you can expect to be better in a sequel, but it never got one. Oh well. On a sale, def. worth it.
I am a veteran to the series, I own the previous two titles across many platforms, including GoG, as I got them in a bundle including this third game. Ow boy, where to begin. Technical: The game is RAW, raw as in uncooked, because undercooked is a massive understatement, it's littered with bugs and glitches, with poor response times and bad game design. Here is a short list of things that have gone wrong: Input latency: I noticed it when I capped it to 60 FPS, not that bad in higher FPS (144 in my case). (Reverse) Mouse Acceleration: Hard locked, cannot be changed. Extremely poor lock on camera: It is too close to the player character, it blocks your view and it's angled poorly making it hard to judge distance and it will happily drop the lock if so much as a pixel of terrain gets in between you two. Crashes, Several crashes happened, as someone with standards, 1 crash is too many, come on. Hard locked saves, my save hard locked because I selected NO during a YES/NO dialog regarding plot development, whether I want to go beyond the point of no return. Selecting NO hard locked the game by removing my means to progress, developers supposedly investigated the issue a year ago, as seen on the Steam forums, this never got fixed and if had restarted my game, GoG Galaxy would have over-written my save file, thankfully I downloaded a backup trough Galaxy before quitting, allowing me to roll back, this is so bad, I should refund it for this reason alone, 30 hours in, I would have been left with absolutely nothing. No joke, default Unreal Engine 4 texture are used on some containers and they are right in front of the player, 4 of them right before a boss fight. I have 24 documented images of these babies. More, but I have a character count, please remove it @GoG! Narrative: There is basically no lore or story, it's all shoved in to the last 2 hours across 30m max of, DS1 and 2 did it right with intrigue and deep, clever writing.
