+Fantastic game
+Tons of customization in terms of characters and difficulty
But...
-Buggiest game I've played in decades
-Yet another dev with a million different digital editions that add little or no value but more than double the price (Is no one else sick of this practice?)
After the recent patch, which've added the turn base combat (which is a great addition) all saved games stop working because of some missing DLC, though I have all of them (which is really bad).
So as much as I've wanted a turn base combat mode, never I imagined I had to start anew.
So going to wait for the fix (developers, hope you listen to the community)
This started out as one of the coolest games I've played in a long time. All the fun stuff was in the kingdom management, rolling through doing quests, leveling up, all great. Then, the House at the End of Time...The game becomes a Save Load hellscape of chores, where you've invested too much time to quit, but all you want is for this "game" to end so you can try to forget it and move on with your life. I've not been so let down and disappointed in a game design before.
A game is fun, not just difficult to be "challenging" Devs, don't kid yourself. There's no talking your way around it. I shouldn't have to load save a million times on normal, NORMAL mode. And I will not just turn down the difficulty on a game, that's BS as an escape. Challenges are still fun, and you're not supposed to make people do the same fights 50 times just to get through them only to find another one just like it.
I could actually say that about a great many fights in this game, where if you don't know that one thing that you need to know, you aren't going to get through it, and I assure you most people do not want to try everything they can on every fight till they find it, so in frustration you have to stop your game and google just about every one of these fights to find out the dumb thing you're missing to get through the fight. You can't market to everyone and expect us all to spend time learning all that junk just to progress through a game.
So much potential, but so many balance problems. If you want to spend hours reading someone else's walkthroughs or hours load-save scumming, then this game is for you.
... really spoiled this whole thing.
A pretty fun game up that part. The beginning is rough, but thems the breaks with low level adventuring. The middle is fun, though you don't quite get enough time for kingdom management and you will have to learn to edit save files as Kingdom stability is undermined by an event labled "opportunity." No biggie; just some text editing to fix something incredibly broken that can derail your whole game. Hardly even counts as cheating. More an inevitable necessity.
The ending, though. Ugh. Blargh. What a miserable, disengaging slog.
It says something for a game when I tune out, drop all the difficulty sliders to their minimum, and push through just to be done with it. I can manage a challenge; I dropped the Linnorm before taking Varnhold and the Dragon before taking Pitax. But constantly dealing with enemies that deal high amounts of unavoidable ability damage just sucks; if this was a game run at my FLGS, I'd flip the table and the birds and never come back.
A solid 4 stars before the end game.
Can't even pass first mission of the main quest, fog does not clear when it should and you just run out of time, the part where thw fog should clear does not trigger so you just can wait until you run out of time
don't bother with this game, it has game breaking bugs after 3 years