I have about 100 hours in the game and got to house at the edge of time and then i stopped with "why bother".

The basic RPG game is pretty forward and while there were few game stopping bugs, they were fixed with patches in such manner that i was able to continue.

The kingdom side of the game was and is a mess. The mechanics are not told in any reasonable fashion during the game and you have to guess lot of things.

The timetable on the kingdom side is so strict, that the badly made project/event feature messes things up. Some projects take immediate time from you, while others don't. Those that take time will go forward even if your kingdom burns to cinders while it is happening. The retarded event rule "this expires at the start of next month regardless of when the event came up" multiplied with those projects leading to time warp makes end of the months pretty much useless in terms of projects that take time unless you choose to save/reload a lot. And often you will have to.

As kingdom can lead you losing the game, your adventuring side is restricted by the kingdom. I probably missed some 20% of the areas because i had no time searching areas because you gotta keep the kingdom advisors bonuses up so the kingdom doesn't get fucked up. And even when i did that, i got lots of events that had DCs that required nat 20 to succeed as DC was a lot higher than 20 + advisor ability.

On the kingdom side of things, war with Pitax was especially shitty event, as there were events that dropped your kingdom values 20-40 at a time. Then as you get enough events with problems that fail, your kingdom will get in worse shape that drops advisor ability 1-4 points, making even normal events difficult to win. Again, lots of save/reload. You can buy happiness to your kingdom with 1000BP which is pretty much something that you need to do many times unless you are lucky with problems. I probably used something like 500 000 gold to buying BPs because of events regarding pitax.

The final nail in the coffin came with the final chapter. I got the information about the event and didn't have even time to explore thousand voices area. Now it could have been possible to do that but i used the time to get my kingdom back on its' feet after the pitax fiasco and the final chapter event is such that it will kill your kingdom unless you react immediately. So hurry to ending.

The ending is one big area called house at the edge of time, and it is just plain stupid. The level of opposition is such that there are ACs from 55-70 in there. The whole area has regenerating enemies(which can be dealt with thou) and those wild hunt types that create automatic paralyze that makes freedom of movement something that has to be on all the time instead of sometimes. If you don't have packload of those ready, sucks to be you. Furthermore the area starts so that you lose all your companions and you might get them back or they might die depending on quest statuses and story. I had done the quests so i didn't lose that many characters, but as i lost Tristian, i didn't get healer in the beginning at all. And its pretty easy to think how fun that is.

In the end i played the house to a certain point and then just burned out to this game. The last area felt more like doing boring job than fun / challenging game. I don't know how they playtested the area or if they playtested it at all, but if they did, all their tester must have been some serious min/maxers. With normal lvl 16 party, it was simply put boring drag until you didn't want to play anymore.

I think the game has great potential, but it would have needed a year or more development time to remove the bugs and playtest the game in professional manner. Many novel features of game like the kingdom became things that made it boring effort instead of fun game. The unbalanced areas did exactly the same thing. I could have finished the final chapter but it was clear at that point that it would be lots of save/reload with rests all the time. That's just not fun, i rather enjoy my games instead of play soviet gulag RPG.

Luckily, Red dead redemption 2 was released today, so i can look forward to enjoyable gaming this weekend.

Yeah it is fun if you tweak the difficulty down, but then you hit the end and it is just beyond a painful grindfest that sucks any previous enjoyment out of the game.

The end is broken difficult on Story mode enemies with 60+ AC, perma concealment, perma stun, dispell magic, evasion boss level CR and there are packs of 10+ lol.

Until this is fixed there is no point in playing I beat it just see the end but for the average player stay FAR away until patched this was not remotely playtested.

As a note, I played through on Challenging with Optimized characters to beat the final act dropped to Story mode and used cheats not fun AT ALL.

Yeah.. you know when you drop to story mode, BUFF to the point of silly (because you have already died to the mobs in the next room, so you know what is coming on the save/reload) and then trap, AOE very spell you have, and hit them with EVERYTHING.. and the fey mobs not only dont go down, but you dont even kill a single one. Checking the logs.. you can see their stats, resists, just crikey.

Pitax is completely broken as well, or at least is for me. Further chapters you get the more broken it gets, with C5 being I would say 75% broken.

I am 120+ hours into the game, and see many many of your points. I have restarted several times, got my arms around kingdom management so at least it isnt blowing up, but your points there are DEAD on. Because of the EOM events, I would MAKE SURE I am in the throneroom as each month rolled over, to clear up any events, queue up those I can, be ready for the next months items. Any 14 days gone projects (silly to lock you into those for two weeks?!) HAVE to be done at the start of each month, (only one usually, maybe two if lucky on save/load results) because you dont want to roll over into the NEXT month with new emergecies cropping up in the two weeks you are locked down, then failing automatically.

Dead on points.

I really hope the 1.1 has that 1k+ bug fixes just because wow it needs it. I WANT this game to be successful.. really enjoy it, appreciate the story they are telling and the world they are bulding. I want it to be successful so we see expansions, DLCs and more content as this setup lends itself to easy module/area expansions!

Really want this to go well and hope the next big patch does it, but I am doing the same.. I am setting the game aside until at LEAST 1.1, and probably 1.1X for the patches to the patch afterwards, then my third full restart.

I think i'll wait few months or half a year at least and look through forums for what is the state of game, then i might replay the game if it seems there is reason for optimism.

I sure hope they fix all these things. The game has great bones to build on. I still like it better than the AFK battles of POE.

I've only played for a little over 9 hours, but have had my saves deleted twice; this was prior to any of the later patches. After reading the above and other posts, I've reached the same conclusion as Muhvi in that I'll wait another six months to a year and try again.

This is the most stupid game ever.

I loose 90% of the time on traveling on the map like a slug, resting and loading for every little thing for hours.

Trully annoing to the point I want to break something out of nerves it gives me.

And why do we have different type of damage if defence is all in one?

Take Pillars of Eturnity - have some minor issues, but 100000000 times better gameplaay.

So sorry gave money and time to this SH**Y game.

I will be brief. This game easily one of the most hated yet most beloved games in the world. Awful, perverted, plagued by countless bugs and... so beautiful, it reminds me Troika Games

I would both agree and disagree. yes, it's kinda convoluted, but "perfect" kingdom management leaved about a month of game time before the portals with all quests done. now it'll be about 1.5-2 month. so that's factually false.

house is pita, but mostly cause it's boring. it's not hard or challenging.

as my credentials I can present about 600h of game time(1200ish total but it was tabbed for about half of it)

Tells something about the quality of game if they still appear, mine was posted in October.