So I wrote a frigging novel for a Steam review after pondering for a while, and I'm 12619 characters too long, so let me post it the full version here for discussion and reference purposes. Overall, at its current stage, I can't recommend the game at its price, despite its huge potential.
STEAM REVIEW
tl;dr - I don't recommend this game. Great sandbox and game concept, battle mechanics (strategy-wise and personally are absolutely amazing), and campaign progression kept me hooked up for over a hundred hours and more to come, but some broken mechanism, the fact that the game is not fleshed out enough, and save-breaking bugs make it impracticable and unsustainable.
It has good potential, though, but the Early Access, at the current stage of the game, should've been at least 35-40% off in order to warrant a purchase for the average gamer.
It's a long review, but I felt like it was needed to explain my honest recommendation despite REALLY enjoying the game, having the intention of playing it, and proving to these die-hard fans that I actually understand and recognize its good points while still disagreeing that it's a recommend.
Recommendation: Don't buy it at full price, or if the discount is below 35%.
Review - long version
I rarely write reviews on games, but I felt like I had to pitch in my 2 cents after purchasing this game, reading the reviews, taking a lot of time to wonder whether or not to purchase said game and being a bit implicated on the TW forums. English isn't my first language, don't be ****s.
As a disclaimer, I had not played Mount & Blade 1, but had been recommended that game for a while (over 2 years) by afriend
, and regularly reconsidering purchasing said game over the past years at various periods, finding the style and theme fitted me, but deciding to wait for the new release.
So during these times, I had the opportunity to watch a lot of YT videos, reviews, and other comments regarding Mount & Blade to understand its mechanics before Bannerlord came out.
Upon it coming out, I also took the time to check the reviews and ponder whether or not it was worth it, and if the Early Release stage would be satisfying or not, and had mixed thoughts - some saying that it was amazing and totally worth it, some saying it wasn't completely fleshed out. After 100hrs with and without mode, campaign and multiplayer, I tend to take the side of people saying that it's not fleshed out enough to be worth playing, unless you're a massive fan of the franchise.
The game concept and skeleton is good, but that's all it is at the moment, a skeleton, from which is missing all the meat. It has incredible potential, both vanilla and through mods, and the devs are incredibly active, literally fixing dozens upon dozens of bugs and posting a detailed list of their work everyday.
Pros
Sandbox
This game is the very definition of a sandbox. Since the very beginning, you spawn into a training area that basically just tells you how to manage yourself in a fight (and even then, it took me a while, some YT videos and some multiplayer to understand the best way to behave in actual combat), then throws you into the world with a generic go and get strongernoob my lord type of main quest.
It's then up to you to travel to villages, understand that you can trade or grab recruits, that most of it is empty or completely useless to visit or travel, and so are the villagers, and that if there is no blue exclamation mark beside an NPC, it's worthless to even enter it, unless you want to have unique passionate conversations about the meaning of life and death and what awaits you beyond it all with an NPC.
An explanation about that would've been good, and would've made me save a couple of hours making sure I wasn't missing anything in the cities/towns.
Afterwards, its all up to you. You want to focus on trading? Good, go ahead and trade from city to city. Want to focus on helping people and having better relations? Great, a lot of villagers, town citizens and lords need help with some quests (very generic and get old fast, but gives you good rep and money). Want to focus on becoming the champion of Calradia’s arenas? Great, go from town to town and be the master of the arenas, collecting the loot on the way, and obviously betting on your victory and staking with high risk that hard-earned money
. I could go on and on with smithing, starting trading caravans, buying workshops, playing different board games depending on the region, etc.
The freedom it allows is refreshing from all the games already fleshed out for you, and the world evolves and just doesn't give two ****s about you and the wars proceed, the alliances form, the babies get made, the lords get taken captive, the castles get captured, the armies get formed, fight, and die.
Battles
One thing to say about the battles : oof
You start alone, or with puny recruits, and yet after long hours of hard work you can join a kingdom and join armies to take part in [strike]crusades[/strike] wars, and yet no 2 fights are the same.
The terrain and maps are varied depending on where you meet them on the battlefield, and you have to adapt your strategy accordingly. You act both as a captain controlling your various troops (infantry, ranged, cavalry, archer cavalry, namely) and ordering them around in different positions, movements, attacking or holding fire, facing which side, and in which formation
, and as the hero of your own army with your OP gear taking part of the battle.
Your participation in the battle can literally shift the balance, as a good cavalry with a decent polearm or archer can easily flank and get dozens of kill in a mid-sized battle, making it winnable even when the numbers aren't in your favour. While this being totally possible, a great plus in this game is that it absolutely doesn't make it too easy on the hero - your gear doesn't make you invincible, and you're always 2-4 good hits away from dying. One wrong move as cavalry and your horse will get piked the **** down, and you will get surrounded with physically no way of freeing yourself and continuing the battle.
And if you die/get wounded in battle, as the hero, no one is left to command your troops, so good luck to them! The realism of the battles and the perfect balance between captain and hero is something that even Heroes and Generals couldn't achieve, and I have to tip my hat to the perfect balance achieved between these two roles, making the battle mechanism so addictive I can't get enough of the campaign, especially with big armies.
Having a big army isn't the only thing that matters, though it is important : some quests will require a limited amount of troops following you in your party, bandit hideouts will only allow you to bring 8 people (although I suggest modding it up), and you'll often be challenged to duels during quests, so your army size doesn't matter.
Getting the hang of the battle is also extremely satisfying, as you have to take into consideration the actual movement of whatever weapon you're using, make sure that the distance is appropriate so the actual blade touches the enemy, take into consideration the relative movement speed of each player to establish the damage (meaning if you throw a javelin at someone running away from you vs throw it at a cavalry rushing you, one will deal very low damage and the other will probably be a 1-hit kill), have impeccable timing to chamber block
and to block, just to name a few.
And yes, I didn't even start talking about the fact that when you get big enough, you start laying siege on castles and towns, with SIEGE TOWERS, BATTERING RAMS TO LITERALLY BREAK DOWN THE FRONT WALLS, and infantry trying to set up ladders that can be destroyed or put down by the defending castles in order to try to get inside and seize it.
Meanwhile, defendants have CATAPULTS and BALLISTAS, all their archers up on the towers, and can throw rocks through the cracks of the floor to kill the invading army and/or their siege constructions, while raining fiery rocks on them.
All the while commanding your various armies and siege weapons.
While having 1000 AIs on the map each inflicting location and speed-dependent damage.
Really, the battle system, both on a personal level and on the captain side, is just incredible, with huge potential, and it's hard to get enough of it.
Campaign map
The map is big enough to have endless fun, not too big to make it impracticable on horseback. The time flows in a reasonable manner, the kingdoms are independent, fight each other, and you have a decent chance to join an army and tip the balance of the war (yes your weight can actually make a difference, but it will take time and grinding to do so, because otherwise you'll be a drop in the ocean).
Your choices matter, and by that I mean, all of them. Think wisely when you choose your quests, when you raid villages (even your own companions might not like it, especially the doctors), when you attack someone (anyone), as it will matter later on, affecting your relationship with lords and your overall reputation.
The map has various regions - plains, mountains, snow, desert, forests, each affecting your speed differently. Your troops need food, which you need to pillage or buy. Their morale vary according to multiple variables, they heal, level up, and prisoners can be domesticated according to different paces. You have a great variety in skills. Prices of goods vary according to region and what the nearby villages produce, and re-balance themselves through natural trade of NPCs and lords' caravans. As previously mentioned, kingdoms behave, develop and fight completely independently from you.
Finally, various goals to encourage development of your clan give you dozen of hours of decent play-through before you attain a stage where your clan level is high enough to have a big party, and you can start controlling your own little parcel of the map, with its castles, villages and cities, and all the responsibilities that come with it.
Once you have that, you can start working on your relations with the various clans, play politics to get your policies pushed forward, and/or start your own kingdom or have enough influence to control the kingdom you joined. Hell, you can even ask some opposing clans that have less than optimal relationship with their own kingdom to defect to you!
Once again, the freedom of action wins, and the possibilities are endless, depending on the skills you hone, and the way you play.
Background story
The character creation allows great customization through a great story-driven way. While it gives you multiple choices which each lead to other choices, each comes with a personal story from your relatives to your childhood, teenage years, and adult life achievements, each of which affect your skills differently. You managed to single-handedly fight bandits that attacked your city when young? This will give you some melee fighting skills. You organized your city so they would defend against said bandits? Here are some focus points/levels in tactics and leadership.
The same applies to companions when meeting them in various taverns - each of them will have a decently fleshed out background story which both explains where they come from and their past, and gives you a hint to their skills, and if they're worth bringing into your party or not.
This is a great immersive way to allow you to carve your own world, and to really get into the kingdom of Calradia.
Conclusion
I didn't touch into the varying weapons you can use, the mounts, and all the various skills such as engineering, smithing, scouting, roguery, charm, leadership, all of which can be leveled in various ways, adding great perks to your play-through, and with their nuances, but let's just say that the main theme of the pros is that this game has [strike]huge[/strike]
untapped potential, and the devs are working hard for the game to reach its peak.
Some aspects of the game are really well fleshed out already, the economy seems pretty balanced, and they're fine-tuning it still. I don't use the smithing system much so it would need a buff to be worth even trying, but it seems to be working fine too and offer great variety.
Did I mention this game is moddable? Yeah, you can install vortex/nexus, and already you have fixes and fine-tuners, autotraders, and various mods to improve your gameplay, like, A LOT. And it will only grow in the future, as this game gives you endless possibility with such a sandbox concept.
With that review, the game just seems amazing, right? Wait until the next section. I recognize all the above-mentioned good aspects of the game, but it doesn't change the game-breaking mechanics that prevent me from recommending this game at its current price.
Cons
So why shouldn't you buy it? I will just give it to you straight - nothing is fleshed out, bugs are game-breaking, and the game feels hollow.
I mentioned that the sandbox part of the game was great, but without anything to fill it with, it all just seems empty and meaningless. The main quests have objectives that sometimes are so vague or impossible, that they don't even make sense. Did anyone even manage to "stop the conspiracy" at its beginning? Yeah, me neither - just let the clock run down and give up on your hopes for a pro-imperial or anti-imperial kingdom, weakling!
And the side quests are just as ridiculous. It starts with lords' family members getting stuck as your companions forever (yeah I don't get involved into family feuds anymore), to borrowed troops never being recognized as having been upgraded, to caravans getting lost in the woods, literally disappearing and never either dying making you fail the quest, or reaching their destination for you to complete the quest, to investigations for spies which lead you to an impossible solution OR simply bugging with no contenders.
I don't even feel like doing quests anymore because I have a 50-50 chance of not completing it and ruining my reputation with a lord just because the quest bugs, not even because I don't have the skill/time/way to complete it.
The quests are also impossibly hollow. The cities are big, you have a lot of people in them, of various trades, you have thugs in the cities, you have workshops, a whole economy working. And yet, all the quests will imply :
- Delivering goods/herd;
- Being bodyguards for a caravan;
- Helping with family issues
;
- Bringing goods;
- Going to location X to fight Y;
And none of the quests have any decent explanation/story to guide it. It's pure, unadulterated grinding with extremely low variety which makes me remember the worst of MMORPGs.
And yet, we know that TW can make great backgrounds, because we see it in the character selection/creation mode, and for the companions, so why not hire one or two more writers and have them write detailed witcher-level stories to entertain the player while he completes quests? Probably a question of money, but for the price charged, sincerely, it isn't worth it.
The battles are great, but a lot of memory leaks make some of them impracticable, although they seem to be working on it. The AI probably has around 10IQ at moments, and at others, it seems like a 5D underwater hippo hippo on the moon AI chess inter-galactic champion in the way it manages huge armies, uses terrain to its advantage to thin out the enemy army while baiting half of it with cavalry on the flanks and putting a shield wall of infantry while archers rain arrow on the opposing cavalry. Sometimes, it will rush blindly and won't be able to aim with its arrows, and sometimes, it will fake strike at 3 different places before having a perfectly aimed sword thrust on your head while you're trying to block it.
The worst part must be the campaign map AI. How many ******* times have I followed an army to war only to have it hesitate between attacking 2 different places, starting siege on one, giving up when the siege was almost built, go to the other one, rinse and repeat until an army large enough from the opposing kingdom has gathered to completely wipe us? Too many ******* times for it to even be funny anymore.
The campaign map AI also makes it so that kingdoms will eventually, because of their stupid choices, be steamrolled by one or two stronger kingdoms, making any possible hope for you to carve out your own kingdom from your small clan virtually impossible when fighting an unstoppable force
.
Even if you want to wait for the campaign to be perfected while honing your skills into multiplayer, good luck! Servers crash 50% of the times, there are a total of like 5 servers during peak time, and they switch their location depending on the respective peaks, and more often than ever you'll have between 0 and 10 people searching with the same critera as yourself, wait 30 mins, and have half your team abandon on the first round without any consequence whatsoever.
There is no ranking system either, and not a great variety of modes, even though some of them would obviously be in extremely high demand, especially with a low player base (1v1 servers when?!?!?). Stats are also broken, and some bugs in the map can be exploited
.
And yet, the economy system works well, the reputation, renown, influence, and kingdom relations seem to work fine (with my limited experience in the last one), but the same effort to build them should be applied generally to the game for it to be worth it.
Now I recognize this is EA, I recognize that they have been working for years on their engine rather than the game itself, and my wild guess is that they needed an influx of liquidity
to pay their employees and continue the development of the game.
But with all that I've seen, isn't EA, nor beta, nor even alpha, even if you apply the EA tag to it (and yeah, they just created these two distinct modes from the regular EA because of how buggy even their patches could be), it is simply an empty world, a sole engine, and they are literally creating even the most basic parts of the game as you play along and give feedback.
This is the development stage of the game, and it shouldn't be on the market.
[h1]Final conclusion[/h1]
With all of that said, the casual and even experienced gamer that is legitimately looking for a game to play shouldn't buy it in its EA stage, even with 10% off on it.
I realize this recommendation is counter-productive as without the money the game probably won't develop as fast as if it received a big influx of cash, but to be honest with the player, it's not worth it at this stage.
Too many bugs and problems, the enjoyment is way too limited by the shallowness of the world. It will just make you long for more, and while I have faith in TW, the deception will be big if they don't achieve what they could with this game.
At this price, you should only purchase if you're a long-lasting fan of the franchise and would be willing to donate half of the price you'll pay to the devs, because that's what it is at this point, or if you want to have access to it before everyone else for modding development purposes.
Don't expect the campaign to work well with the broken quests and AI, don't expect to be able to enjoy flawlessly the multiplayer mode with its very limited capacity and modes, and its broken servers.
For all these reasons, while I still enjoy the game and will continue to play it, I can't recommend it at its current price, but I definitely wish the best for the devs and playerbase.
Now **** on me for not understanding the mechanics, or not realizing that this is EA, see if I care ¯\_ツ_/¯
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Now even if I said I didn't care, thoughts, comments, criticism, insults?
STEAM REVIEW
tl;dr - I don't recommend this game. Great sandbox and game concept, battle mechanics (strategy-wise and personally are absolutely amazing), and campaign progression kept me hooked up for over a hundred hours and more to come, but some broken mechanism, the fact that the game is not fleshed out enough, and save-breaking bugs make it impracticable and unsustainable.
It has good potential, though, but the Early Access, at the current stage of the game, should've been at least 35-40% off in order to warrant a purchase for the average gamer.
It's a long review, but I felt like it was needed to explain my honest recommendation despite REALLY enjoying the game, having the intention of playing it, and proving to these die-hard fans that I actually understand and recognize its good points while still disagreeing that it's a recommend.
Recommendation: Don't buy it at full price, or if the discount is below 35%.
Review - long version
I rarely write reviews on games, but I felt like I had to pitch in my 2 cents after purchasing this game, reading the reviews, taking a lot of time to wonder whether or not to purchase said game and being a bit implicated on the TW forums. English isn't my first language, don't be ****s.
As a disclaimer, I had not played Mount & Blade 1, but had been recommended that game for a while (over 2 years) by a
internet stranger
So during these times, I had the opportunity to watch a lot of YT videos, reviews, and other comments regarding Mount & Blade to understand its mechanics before Bannerlord came out.
Upon it coming out, I also took the time to check the reviews and ponder whether or not it was worth it, and if the Early Release stage would be satisfying or not, and had mixed thoughts - some saying that it was amazing and totally worth it, some saying it wasn't completely fleshed out. After 100hrs with and without mode, campaign and multiplayer, I tend to take the side of people saying that it's not fleshed out enough to be worth playing, unless you're a massive fan of the franchise.
The game concept and skeleton is good, but that's all it is at the moment, a skeleton, from which is missing all the meat. It has incredible potential, both vanilla and through mods, and the devs are incredibly active, literally fixing dozens upon dozens of bugs and posting a detailed list of their work everyday.
Pros
Sandbox
This game is the very definition of a sandbox. Since the very beginning, you spawn into a training area that basically just tells you how to manage yourself in a fight (and even then, it took me a while, some YT videos and some multiplayer to understand the best way to behave in actual combat), then throws you into the world with a generic go and get stronger
It's then up to you to travel to villages, understand that you can trade or grab recruits, that most of it is empty or completely useless to visit or travel, and so are the villagers, and that if there is no blue exclamation mark beside an NPC, it's worthless to even enter it, unless you want to have unique passionate conversations about the meaning of life and death and what awaits you beyond it all with an NPC.
I have a quick question.
Never mind.
An explanation about that would've been good, and would've made me save a couple of hours making sure I wasn't missing anything in the cities/towns.
Afterwards, its all up to you. You want to focus on trading? Good, go ahead and trade from city to city. Want to focus on helping people and having better relations? Great, a lot of villagers, town citizens and lords need help with some quests (very generic and get old fast, but gives you good rep and money). Want to focus on becoming the champion of Calradia’s arenas? Great, go from town to town and be the master of the arenas, collecting the loot on the way, and obviously betting on your victory and staking with high risk that hard-earned money
lol jk you obv made a save before starting the tourny and you just re-load it if ever you're stuck in a melee group fight with baddies or just can't solo the last survivor
The freedom it allows is refreshing from all the games already fleshed out for you, and the world evolves and just doesn't give two ****s about you and the wars proceed, the alliances form, the babies get made, the lords get taken captive, the castles get captured, the armies get formed, fight, and die.
Battles
One thing to say about the battles : oof
You start alone, or with puny recruits, and yet after long hours of hard work you can join a kingdom and join armies to take part in [strike]crusades[/strike] wars, and yet no 2 fights are the same.
The terrain and maps are varied depending on where you meet them on the battlefield, and you have to adapt your strategy accordingly. You act both as a captain controlling your various troops (infantry, ranged, cavalry, archer cavalry, namely) and ordering them around in different positions, movements, attacking or holding fire, facing which side, and in which formation
never forget to protect your archers from enemy cavalry pls ;__;
Your participation in the battle can literally shift the balance, as a good cavalry with a decent polearm or archer can easily flank and get dozens of kill in a mid-sized battle, making it winnable even when the numbers aren't in your favour. While this being totally possible, a great plus in this game is that it absolutely doesn't make it too easy on the hero - your gear doesn't make you invincible, and you're always 2-4 good hits away from dying. One wrong move as cavalry and your horse will get piked the **** down, and you will get surrounded with physically no way of freeing yourself and continuing the battle.
And if you die/get wounded in battle, as the hero, no one is left to command your troops, so good luck to them! The realism of the battles and the perfect balance between captain and hero is something that even Heroes and Generals couldn't achieve, and I have to tip my hat to the perfect balance achieved between these two roles, making the battle mechanism so addictive I can't get enough of the campaign, especially with big armies.
Having a big army isn't the only thing that matters, though it is important : some quests will require a limited amount of troops following you in your party, bandit hideouts will only allow you to bring 8 people (although I suggest modding it up), and you'll often be challenged to duels during quests, so your army size doesn't matter.
Getting the hang of the battle is also extremely satisfying, as you have to take into consideration the actual movement of whatever weapon you're using, make sure that the distance is appropriate so the actual blade touches the enemy, take into consideration the relative movement speed of each player to establish the damage (meaning if you throw a javelin at someone running away from you vs throw it at a cavalry rushing you, one will deal very low damage and the other will probably be a 1-hit kill), have impeccable timing to chamber block
yeah right no one chamber blocks on purpose, it just happens by mistake someone, stop lying
And yes, I didn't even start talking about the fact that when you get big enough, you start laying siege on castles and towns, with SIEGE TOWERS, BATTERING RAMS TO LITERALLY BREAK DOWN THE FRONT WALLS, and infantry trying to set up ladders that can be destroyed or put down by the defending castles in order to try to get inside and seize it.
Meanwhile, defendants have CATAPULTS and BALLISTAS, all their archers up on the towers, and can throw rocks through the cracks of the floor to kill the invading army and/or their siege constructions, while raining fiery rocks on them.
All the while commanding your various armies and siege weapons.
While having 1000 AIs on the map each inflicting location and speed-dependent damage.
Yeah, keep your case open and your fire extinguisher nearby, or play with the settings, because I was on High settings like every other game, and on my first 700+ battle, the game/comp just crashed from the overload.
Really, the battle system, both on a personal level and on the captain side, is just incredible, with huge potential, and it's hard to get enough of it.
Campaign map
The map is big enough to have endless fun, not too big to make it impracticable on horseback. The time flows in a reasonable manner, the kingdoms are independent, fight each other, and you have a decent chance to join an army and tip the balance of the war (yes your weight can actually make a difference, but it will take time and grinding to do so, because otherwise you'll be a drop in the ocean).
Your choices matter, and by that I mean, all of them. Think wisely when you choose your quests, when you raid villages (even your own companions might not like it, especially the doctors), when you attack someone (anyone), as it will matter later on, affecting your relationship with lords and your overall reputation.
The map has various regions - plains, mountains, snow, desert, forests, each affecting your speed differently. Your troops need food, which you need to pillage or buy. Their morale vary according to multiple variables, they heal, level up, and prisoners can be domesticated according to different paces. You have a great variety in skills. Prices of goods vary according to region and what the nearby villages produce, and re-balance themselves through natural trade of NPCs and lords' caravans. As previously mentioned, kingdoms behave, develop and fight completely independently from you.
Finally, various goals to encourage development of your clan give you dozen of hours of decent play-through before you attain a stage where your clan level is high enough to have a big party, and you can start controlling your own little parcel of the map, with its castles, villages and cities, and all the responsibilities that come with it.
Once you have that, you can start working on your relations with the various clans, play politics to get your policies pushed forward, and/or start your own kingdom or have enough influence to control the kingdom you joined. Hell, you can even ask some opposing clans that have less than optimal relationship with their own kingdom to defect to you!
Once again, the freedom of action wins, and the possibilities are endless, depending on the skills you hone, and the way you play.
Background story
limited to potential
The character creation allows great customization through a great story-driven way. While it gives you multiple choices which each lead to other choices, each comes with a personal story from your relatives to your childhood, teenage years, and adult life achievements, each of which affect your skills differently. You managed to single-handedly fight bandits that attacked your city when young? This will give you some melee fighting skills. You organized your city so they would defend against said bandits? Here are some focus points/levels in tactics and leadership.
The same applies to companions when meeting them in various taverns - each of them will have a decently fleshed out background story which both explains where they come from and their past, and gives you a hint to their skills, and if they're worth bringing into your party or not.
This is a great immersive way to allow you to carve your own world, and to really get into the kingdom of Calradia.
Conclusion
I didn't touch into the varying weapons you can use, the mounts, and all the various skills such as engineering, smithing, scouting, roguery, charm, leadership, all of which can be leveled in various ways, adding great perks to your play-through, and with their nuances, but let's just say that the main theme of the pros is that this game has [strike]huge[/strike]
YUUUUGE
Some aspects of the game are really well fleshed out already, the economy seems pretty balanced, and they're fine-tuning it still. I don't use the smithing system much so it would need a buff to be worth even trying, but it seems to be working fine too and offer great variety.
Did I mention this game is moddable? Yeah, you can install vortex/nexus, and already you have fixes and fine-tuners, autotraders, and various mods to improve your gameplay, like, A LOT. And it will only grow in the future, as this game gives you endless possibility with such a sandbox concept.
With that review, the game just seems amazing, right? Wait until the next section. I recognize all the above-mentioned good aspects of the game, but it doesn't change the game-breaking mechanics that prevent me from recommending this game at its current price.
Cons
So why shouldn't you buy it? I will just give it to you straight - nothing is fleshed out, bugs are game-breaking, and the game feels hollow.
I mentioned that the sandbox part of the game was great, but without anything to fill it with, it all just seems empty and meaningless. The main quests have objectives that sometimes are so vague or impossible, that they don't even make sense. Did anyone even manage to "stop the conspiracy" at its beginning? Yeah, me neither - just let the clock run down and give up on your hopes for a pro-imperial or anti-imperial kingdom, weakling!
And the side quests are just as ridiculous. It starts with lords' family members getting stuck as your companions forever (yeah I don't get involved into family feuds anymore), to borrowed troops never being recognized as having been upgraded, to caravans getting lost in the woods, literally disappearing and never either dying making you fail the quest, or reaching their destination for you to complete the quest, to investigations for spies which lead you to an impossible solution OR simply bugging with no contenders.
I don't even feel like doing quests anymore because I have a 50-50 chance of not completing it and ruining my reputation with a lord just because the quest bugs, not even because I don't have the skill/time/way to complete it.
The quests are also impossibly hollow. The cities are big, you have a lot of people in them, of various trades, you have thugs in the cities, you have workshops, a whole economy working. And yet, all the quests will imply :
- Delivering goods/herd;
- Being bodyguards for a caravan;
- Helping with family issues
seriously stop with the murders and stop losing your daughters, wtf
- Bringing goods;
- Going to location X to fight Y;
And none of the quests have any decent explanation/story to guide it. It's pure, unadulterated grinding with extremely low variety which makes me remember the worst of MMORPGs.
And yet, we know that TW can make great backgrounds, because we see it in the character selection/creation mode, and for the companions, so why not hire one or two more writers and have them write detailed witcher-level stories to entertain the player while he completes quests? Probably a question of money, but for the price charged, sincerely, it isn't worth it.
The battles are great, but a lot of memory leaks make some of them impracticable, although they seem to be working on it. The AI probably has around 10IQ at moments, and at others, it seems like a 5D underwater hippo hippo on the moon AI chess inter-galactic champion in the way it manages huge armies, uses terrain to its advantage to thin out the enemy army while baiting half of it with cavalry on the flanks and putting a shield wall of infantry while archers rain arrow on the opposing cavalry. Sometimes, it will rush blindly and won't be able to aim with its arrows, and sometimes, it will fake strike at 3 different places before having a perfectly aimed sword thrust on your head while you're trying to block it.
The worst part must be the campaign map AI. How many ******* times have I followed an army to war only to have it hesitate between attacking 2 different places, starting siege on one, giving up when the siege was almost built, go to the other one, rinse and repeat until an army large enough from the opposing kingdom has gathered to completely wipe us? Too many ******* times for it to even be funny anymore.
The campaign map AI also makes it so that kingdoms will eventually, because of their stupid choices, be steamrolled by one or two stronger kingdoms, making any possible hope for you to carve out your own kingdom from your small clan virtually impossible when fighting an unstoppable force
and no you're not an immovable wall, you'll just get rammed through
Even if you want to wait for the campaign to be perfected while honing your skills into multiplayer, good luck! Servers crash 50% of the times, there are a total of like 5 servers during peak time, and they switch their location depending on the respective peaks, and more often than ever you'll have between 0 and 10 people searching with the same critera as yourself, wait 30 mins, and have half your team abandon on the first round without any consequence whatsoever.
There is no ranking system either, and not a great variety of modes, even though some of them would obviously be in extremely high demand, especially with a low player base (1v1 servers when?!?!?). Stats are also broken, and some bugs in the map can be exploited
troll under the stairs, you know what I'm talking about!
And yet, the economy system works well, the reputation, renown, influence, and kingdom relations seem to work fine (with my limited experience in the last one), but the same effort to build them should be applied generally to the game for it to be worth it.
Now I recognize this is EA, I recognize that they have been working for years on their engine rather than the game itself, and my wild guess is that they needed an influx of liquidity
gamer cash moniiiiiies
But with all that I've seen, isn't EA, nor beta, nor even alpha, even if you apply the EA tag to it (and yeah, they just created these two distinct modes from the regular EA because of how buggy even their patches could be), it is simply an empty world, a sole engine, and they are literally creating even the most basic parts of the game as you play along and give feedback.
This is the development stage of the game, and it shouldn't be on the market.
[h1]Final conclusion[/h1]
With all of that said, the casual and even experienced gamer that is legitimately looking for a game to play shouldn't buy it in its EA stage, even with 10% off on it.
I realize this recommendation is counter-productive as without the money the game probably won't develop as fast as if it received a big influx of cash, but to be honest with the player, it's not worth it at this stage.
Too many bugs and problems, the enjoyment is way too limited by the shallowness of the world. It will just make you long for more, and while I have faith in TW, the deception will be big if they don't achieve what they could with this game.
At this price, you should only purchase if you're a long-lasting fan of the franchise and would be willing to donate half of the price you'll pay to the devs, because that's what it is at this point, or if you want to have access to it before everyone else for modding development purposes.
Don't expect the campaign to work well with the broken quests and AI, don't expect to be able to enjoy flawlessly the multiplayer mode with its very limited capacity and modes, and its broken servers.
For all these reasons, while I still enjoy the game and will continue to play it, I can't recommend it at its current price, but I definitely wish the best for the devs and playerbase.
Now **** on me for not understanding the mechanics, or not realizing that this is EA, see if I care ¯\_ツ_/¯
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Now even if I said I didn't care, thoughts, comments, criticism, insults?
