Recent reviews by Yinko

The game has severe tech issues on current systems and potentially (at least for me and many others) requires additional manual tweaking to run it smoothly in the first place. The "4GB Patch" was enough for me, but it seems like that is not always the case. EA being EA, they of course won't fix this ever, so take this into account. After using the patch however, the game was PLAYABLE just fine, with 1 or 2 crashes in total. Also the game does have WQHD resolution support, but the UI stays very small and it took some time training my eagle eyes, but maybe there is a mod for it, no idea.

A lot of quests in the game however also have fairly consistent bugs that can happen. In one case an NPC wouldn't trigger their wave event and I had to quickly run away from them after the dialogue so they would move (this is unironically how to fix it). In another quest you have your gear stripped and you are imprisoned, having to kill mobs to get your loot back. The gear of your main character can essentially just bug out and be lost forever. Luckily the game saves for you regularly and as you play more, you will learn when you should save etc.

BUT, the game being so old and having a very dedicated fanbase, made it easy to figure these things out. The wiki contains a great listing of each bug that can appear in a quest, in case something seems fishy while playing, and numerous Reddit threads give good enough advice on everything.

Is this acceptable? No. Should you ever buy the game at anything above 5€? No. Is it worth to go through all of these issues to play this game? Sadly yea, I kind of think so.

I was genuinely impressed by the game's structure, the story and the characters. The game has everything a great RPG needs and more. The story outline is fairly basic (as is in most RPGs like BG3 etc), but requires you to make tough choices that impact the whole game and rewards with meaningful character progression, starting right from your original heritage. There are multiple pretty creative class choices, which you can overlap and combine, tons of gear, a camp system, fully voiced amazing characters and great voice acting and sound design in general. There is romance, non-combat talents/jobs and stats matter.

The combat itself can take some getting used to, as it is a weird "combination" of turn based and RTS combat, but it's preference. You have nice extensive customization options for your whole group in terms of their auto-pilot modes and it works really well, meaning technically you can decide between just manually controling your own character and letting the others do their semi-customized job, or you can treat it as a turn based game and select each skill in every second of the combat individually. There are also some spell combinations that interact with each other, but I found myself not using those often.

The game also has a number of DLCs that you also can import your character to, with Awakening being the most important and longest one. It is roughly 1/3 of the main game's length, and quite important to play considering future games, and also quite good. The others are all like 1-1.5 hours long and are set in different stages of Origins' story and are more something akin to scenarios. You can honestly skip all except Awakening, although Witch Hunt gives some nice closure on some aspects of the story and Golems of Amgarrak is alright as well.

After that, you can carry over choices you made in this game to Dragon Age 2 as well, giving the whole series a more connected approach.

(TLDR) Overall a fantastic spriritual successor to BioWare's Baldur's Gate games that layed amazing gameplay ground works for Larian's BG3 and other RPGs, and is honestly kind of a must play if you are into single player RPGs. It's a little old and cranky by now and of course plagued by those (fixable) tech issues, but in hindsight I am glad that those didn't stop me from experiencing the game.

You can argue a lot about the combat and gameplay changes (which are in the game anyways, even without the expansion), but if you leave that all out Winds of Magic is still kind of underwhelming. Beastmen are alright, kind of overtuned at the time of release but mostly fine as new specials. They got cool sound queues and the overall design is as you would expect them to look like. The >one< new map is nice enough, quite open spaced and challenging, the finale as of now doesn't have any safespots like a lot of the other maps have so you always gotta look out to not get swarmed.

The new weaves however are a problem for me and apparently many others. Those are (I think) over 100 "maps" that are basically parts of the already existing maps, just reversed. Those map parts are imbued with 8 different Aethyr (world-manipulating magic energies in the Warhammer Fantasy universe) that cause the player to experience all kinds of more or less gameplay altering effects. In one you for example get a metal aura buff whenever you kill a special which damages enemies around you. In another one there are lightning strikes spawning on players which you can move out of that can then be used to damage enmies aswell when you push those into it. Each of those 8 winds feels different and is cool when you first see it.

The problem is just that there is absolutely no reason to do them. The gear system is seperate from that of the normal game, meaning you level up your weapons and choose your stats on equipment that has nothing to do with your regular gear. You also have to grind that stuff up by doing weaves or normal missions, which reward you with the new currency for it. However aside from some portrait frames for completing each of the 8 weaves you get nothing for doing them. No gear, no hero skins, no weapon skins. The whole development circle for this game for some reason has a huge problem with implementing actual cosmetics??? The apparent reason to play the weaves is the leaderboard that comes with them. Someone in the world has to show me one game where anyone cares about a leaderboard in a coop pve hack'n'slash game. The devs said there will be Diablo3-like seasons which might require you to pointlessly regrind all your gear. The only information we have about season rewards are portrait frames again. My inventory has like 30 portrait frames or more and for someone that won't care about collecting them there is nothing to show off.

I feel like this all takes away too much resources from creating stuff that is the main reason we all play the game. I would've wished for 3-4 new exciting replayable story maps and nice cosmetics that maybe come with new quests or challenges, but nothing of that core experience gets expanded with this expansion. Oh and also the new Cataclysm mode gives no new chests. So there is also no reason to do that if you don't want to just make it harder for yourself randomly. It's also been 9 months since the last sanctioned mods.

TL;DR: You are basically just paying for 1 new map and portrait frames that are rewards of the weaves. There is no reason to do weaves except for MORE portrait frames at the end of each season. Noone cares about the leaderboard. Beastmen and the new (useless) level cap are also in the base game. Gameplay and combat got !arguably! worse as a general sidenote to the update, which has nothing to do with your money for the expansion though. Anyways, can't recommend.

Servers are beyond bad, client feels like it's still in beta, don't even start about the loading times. If the game works 20% of the time it's fun and competetive like one is used to SF. Tournaments are still fun to watch and the scene around the game is big and friendly. The character diversity and design in general is really good, even if 7 of the 23 currently available ones are DLC characters, but they are decently farmable ingame.
Game seems rushed by Capcom, clear downstep from Ultra Street Fighter IV. As known for the series, the game is hard to get into but can feel really rewarding once you get the hang of it and win your first matches.

No recommendation though, it's just in such a bad spot that makes it almost unplayable. You can't just quickly step in and play a few online matches and in my opinion that is what fighting games are for despite playing offline against friends for fun or on a higher competetive level on a regular basis. Wait for Tekken 7 or play Guilty Gear etc. Otherwise get the game on sale for 20 bucks or less.