Brennan Bell

This game is a complete failure, in my opinion. Nothing really changed since early access, except that even more bugs were somehow introduced to the first two hours of play. The scripts never improved. The plot never developed. Side quests seem just as disjointed from the main storyline as the main storyline quests seem disjointed from each other. There is no real congruency in the plots, and often times, character development stops right as it is about to begin, leaving you with characters that feel childish, flat, and unrefined. Beyond that, there is the gameplay. I approached the ancient dragon in the caverns of eternity, after fighting through leagues of beasts inspired by the theme of the area. It never moved. It just sat there and took damage. I remember cheesing dragons from long range in Dragon Age: Inquisition. This was even worse. My tank was hammering on the dragon as my mages wailed on it from afar, no abilities necessary to beat it, just basic attacks. I went to the bathroom, made a coffee, came back, the dragon was dead, and my tank had taken roughly 20% of its hp in damage. I was not overleveled for this area; in fact, I reached this battle nearly as soon as you possibly could, in the second hardest gameplay difficulty available. I reloaded the game a couple times with the hopes I could experience a proper fight, but the dragon insisted on being an inanimate statue that just dies, but it does eventually start auto attacking your tank a couple times, when it reaches roughly 10-20% hp. Then you get an announcement that the clearly uninteractable chest, for which you "solved a puzzle" to access (a simple intelligence value > X check on the character trying to open a door, with zero actual puzzle present whatsoever), was failed to be stolen from the dragon. Then you get teleported to your surprise ship (that had zero plot reason to actually be there waiting for you when you first boarded it) and you can never access the area again. Additionally, a companion never joined me during a sidequest, so this playthrough not only is missing a companion, but the epic dragon fight the game so carefully warns you about and gives you the option to avoid entirely or fight later, was the most boring gameplay I have ever in my life encountered in a "finished and released" video game. These two bugs were the icing on top; the rest is just as garbage and bug-laden, with random invisible walls obstructing progress and others completely missing, allowing you to simply walk through terrain, but you gain no value out of this because there is no real and meaningful loot in this game. For example, when you travel back to the starting town after boarding your ship, the shops are empty, except the potion shop and on eother shop, which contains something new you can't even buy, but it has a listed price -- The buy option simply does not appear, and no tooltip appears for the item, so I don't even know what it does.