As a long-time lover of cRPGs, this one has to take the cake. It may be the greatest game of the genre created in the last 20+ years, no cap.
If you liked the Divinity: OS series (also by Larian), it's definitely for you; all the detail and depth, but more streamlined and with better onboarding. Veterans of the cRPG genre know what they're in for, but if that confuses you, here's a comparison: it's like the fantasy story, setting, and characters of the first Dragon Age, but with a deep and challenging turn-based combat sort of like XCOM: Enemy Unknown, all of course with D&D flair.
It's the first time in a long time I can say with total honesty: this is a game worth paying full price for. BUY IT! Then: save early, & save often! You won't regret it.
It's a great RPG, with a lot of replayability. The world feels reactive and combat is fun.
It's not without fault however. There's a number of bugs still being patched, at least at the time of wrting, but I haven't experienced anything game breaking. And some of the combat challenges are a little iffy. Otherwise, I think this is easily my personaly game of 2023.
I was told the game is Dragon Age Origins (my favourite RPG of all time) but better. That's something I just cannot agree with because of its story and characters. The problem isn't that I just don't care, but I am actively annoyed.
Almost everybody is racist, including your companions, and not just kinda racist, or casually racist, but racist in the way that if this was actually following how real people act, the main event of the game would be full on race war. Dragon Age racism looks like utopia next to this one. I have read Drizzt Do'Urden's books years ago, which takes place in the same world and I don't remember that amount of racism, even though overcoming racism was one of the main themes of later books.
The story keeps hitting you over your head that you have to hurry to do X and you will die if you won't do X, but it also doesn't let you solve the X because I guess it wants the X to be unsolvable for now and from what I have seen online, it doesn't get solved until the end of the game. At least in games like DA:O, DA:I, ME3, or even Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077, the problem X of the story can be reasonably postponed without being told that you die if you stay still for more than a minute, so you don't feel like the story fights against you.
Maybe this game gets better. Maybe characters get better. From what I have seen on the internet the Act 3 and endings are considered a hot mess even to the people who like this game, so I'm not sure it would get better for me. Either way, I'm done and I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'd rather play Dragon Age II than this, because even that game has more story, real characters and relatable conflicts in the first 1 hour than this game has in all the 7 hours I have managed to get through.
I have played the initial games and all the DLCs of the previous ones.
On this specific one I waited a lot before i buy it as most people jumped in in the early access.
And i can say that the game is just amazing. More than I was expecting for and I am very excited as this game will provide me a lot of hours of playtime with different approach each time.
