On December 11 I purchased Mount & Blade: Warband - Viking Conquest and found it to be very unstable, featuring severe FPS drops and crashing. A hotfix was brought out on December 12, but this only addressed the most immediate of the technical issues. The game is still riddled with bugs and the hotfix did not address the in-game issues which further plague the game, including but not limited to a severe lack of content, particularly in comparison to what regular Mount & Blade players have come to expect from previous titles released under the brand (particularly the Napoleonic Wars DLC, a product which was developed by a team of former modders, just like Viking Conquest).
An argument can be made that these technical issues and the lack of content will be addressed in future patches, but if this is the case it would mean that Viking Conquest is not a finished product and should have been released as an Early Access game, which it was not. If this is not the case, then the developers have knowingly released a faulty product, which is quite simply unethical. My sentiments are echoed on both the Steam forums and the official Taleworlds forums. As of the time of writing, only 41% of 1,303 reviews for Viking Conquest are positive, a shockingly small figure in comparison to the base game (Mount & Blade: Warband) which has 97% positive reviews out of 19,499, and the Napoleonic Wars DLC which sits at 92% of 398. Many of these reviews also bring up the same issues that I have.
Ultimately the situation regarding Viking Conquest is similar to The War Z (now Infestation: Survivor Stories) which was released some years ago as an unfinished product and was removed from the Steam Store with Valve offering full refunds. Viking Conquest is in no way a finished product and advertising it as such by not releasing it as an Early Access title is severely misleading to customers. It is for this reason, and for the other reasons outlined above, that I would ask for a full refund for the Viking Conquest DLC.