Bellwright

Its a great game and I really enjoy it, but there are just some things that really need a tweak for (some) players. I really really want a bigger inventory for example, I'm spending way too much time just walking back and forth, just because my inventory filled up after skinning three wolves.... You encounter enough stuff you want during your travels to have half your backpack filled already by the time you get to your destination. Who is gonna leave pelts, wolves, ores and whatnot behind I ask you?? You really need almost all the stuff you find along the way. The beautiful thing would be that where a developer might not have the manpower and resources to fix all that stuff, that there is an amazing modding community (like there is) that takes a load off of them and helps them by making it possible that this game is enjoyable to as many players as could be. They do it for free and purely out of passion, which is really amazing! The modding community is super active and that is such a great sign for the game and they should cherish and nourish that. Instead of putting out updates every week or so, that almost always break my mods (in my experience anyway). Maybe do it max. once a month, just so the modders at least have a chance to keep up. Theres amazing people that update their mods every week for free, which is crazy. Ive also been spending some hours to learning how to mod myself, I made some progress, but mostly bubkes :( but Ill get there. Who knows Frequent updates make it difficult to rely on mods, which is a shame because the modding community is one of this game's biggest strengths. The modding community really lets people tailor the game to their own preferences. But they keep on updating so many times... So at this point I feel like mods are rendered useless because of this... It's a bummer. The amount of time I spend walking because of a small inventory is insane, and I dont know about other people, but I dont play a game to walk through forests 50% of the time (its not called forest simulator right :P). I wanna build fortresses and pillage and such 'n such. And I know there are backpacks, but theyre still way too small, especially early on Anyway, pls stop updating every time you fart and maybe let the community help you with some of the QoL stuff (so you devs can maybe work on combat a bit more :D)

[h1]Bellwright: an actual sandbox, not a roadmap with WASD support[/h1] Bellwright entered Early Access with broken pathfinding, rough combat and NPCs occasionally sharing one communal brain cell. It also entered Early Access as an actual game. The core loop already worked: survive, recruit villagers, build production chains, equip an army and liberate the region village by village. Since then, Donkey Crew has kept expanding and repairing that machine instead of disappearing into the Early Access fog. [h1]THE GOOD[/h1] [b]Bellwright lets you decide what kind of game you are playing today.[/b] In co-op, one player can chase quests while another hunts, gathers, plans the settlement or handles logistics. Solo, you simply change jobs whenever the mood strikes. You can: [list] [*]Rush progression or turtle for fifty hours. [*]Build an efficient production network or live like a forest goblin. [*]Fight honourably or commit crimes against pathfinding from the nearest rock. [*]Win through melee, archery, fortifications, logistics, numbers or industrial-scale cheese. [*]Follow the campaign or spend the evening discovering why nobody is making flour. [/list] That is actual freedom. Not a dialogue wheel offering three flavours of the same outcome, but a game that lets the player decide what the evening is about. Bellwright also understands something many sandbox developers eventually forget: [b]An overpowered strategy in a single-player game is not a public-health emergency.[/b] Weapons, armour, progression and encounters do get rebalanced, but balance is treated as a default rather than holy scripture. Difficulty settings cover raids, damage, hunger, spoilage, learning speed, durability and most other sources of suffering. There is also an official Modkit and Steam Workshop support. Some games notice that players are enjoying turrets, animals, farming or defensive engineering and immediately call the balance police. Bellwright usually fixes the machine and leaves you in the driver's seat. Want a serious medieval campaign? Fight clean and raise the difficulty. Want to build trenches, abuse terrain and establish a logistics-powered murder economy before advancing the story? Also valid. The game is not constantly leaning over your shoulder like an anxious dungeon master asking whether you are having fun correctly. [b]The developers also kept working after the launch money arrived.[/b] Since release, Bellwright has received major settlement-management improvements, prosperity systems, animal husbandry, official modding, caravans, automated trade, fortifications, new regions and factions, planning tools, player-built roads, better army control, performance work and a frankly indecent pile of smaller fixes. Large updates are followed by hotfix trains for crashes, co-op, quests, navigation, interfaces and late-game settlements. That does not guarantee the future. It does prove that the studio has spent more than two years shipping features instead of merely announcing its intention to develop a game. Valheim found enormous success and then began developing at the speed of continental drift: months of silence followed by news that somebody had invented a new roof angle. Bellwright's cadence comes from another universe. The ownership model is refreshingly boring: [list] [*]Buy the game. [*]Play offline. [*]Host co-op from your existing world. [*]No mandatory publisher account. [*]No microtransaction bazaar. [*]No paid gameplay-DLC staircase attached to the main menu. [/list] The AI voices are clearly disclosed placeholders. They add more than silence would, and I am not performing a toolchain exorcism over temporary voice acting in an unfinished game. [h1]THE BAD[/h1] [b]Freedom is not polish.[/b] The map is broad rather than densely authored. There is plenty of walking, repeated ambient dialogue and downtime where the simulation matters more than handcrafted discovery. The early game can also feel brutally grindy before villagers, priorities, outposts and logistics begin carrying their share of the workload. NPC automation still requires supervision. Workers ignore obvious solutions, choose scenic routes through danger or halt an entire production chain because one basket is in the wrong emotional state. Much of the game is about designing systems, watching them fail and determining whether the cause was poor planning, missing resources, bad priorities or an NPC who has silently decided to abandon material reality. If diagnosing why your settlement stopped producing food sounds like unpaid technical support, this may not be your game. [h1]THE UGLY[/h1] [b]Combat becomes good only after you personally reverse-engineer it.[/b] There is directional blocking, stamina management, spacing, equipment progression, army commands and plenty of room for preparation. The problem is that the game explains far too little. I wasted hours studying timings, testing weapons, separating bugs from mechanics and learning which encounters were simply not meant to be fought in the obvious way. There is no reliably current developer wiki, no useful public bug tracker and no definitive combat tutorial that explains the whole system without mixing current mechanics, old information, guesses and half-obsolete advice. Before that knowledge clicks, combat can resemble a medieval washing-machine accident. Group fights become chaotic. Hit detection can feel questionable. Enemies crowd together. Allies block attacks. Archery and terrain can trivialise encounters, while direct melee against several bandits can turn into a public execution within seconds. The game also does a poor job of communicating whether you lost because of your timing, equipment, stamina, positioning, army composition or some current mechanical defect. Once equipment, preparation, positioning and commands come together, battles can be satisfying. But the learning process is not elegant. It is field research conducted on your own corpse. [h1]WHO SHOULD PLAY IT?[/h1] [b]Play Bellwright if you enjoy:[/b] RimWorld, Necesse, Abiotic Factor, Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, Valheim, Terraria, Factorio or Mount & Blade. Not because Bellwright perfectly copies any of them, but because it occupies the same dangerous intersection of survival, logistics, construction, strategy, combat and "I will just reorganise this one production chain before bed." Its best moments come from solving problems the game did not explicitly script for you: turning a weak settlement into an industrial base, preparing a campaign, reorganising supply lines, fortifying a position or finding a completely unreasonable solution that somehow works. [b]Study it first, or wait for 1.0, if you primarily want:[/b] [list] [*]Kingdom Come-style tactile combat. [*]The Witcher's authored quest density. [*]Baldur's Gate 3's characters and campaign. [*]Skyrim's skill-and-magic toybox. [*]A small, polished loop that explains itself properly. [/list] Bellwright is unfinished, sprawling, grindy, occasionally stupid and unusually generous with player agency. The developers have also given UE5 enough attention to resurrect performance from the grave, although results still depend heavily on hardware, settlement size and current patch quality. It has bugs. It has cheese. It has workers who occasionally behave like medieval printers. It also has something increasingly rare: developers who keep building the game without trying to confiscate the player's fun. [b]I would rather have this unruly machine than another polished corridor pretending to be a sandbox.[/b]

Game has great potential but there are numerous issues plaguing this game there is no way in it's current state should it be brought to console AI pathing is atrocious to the point it breaks the game completely you'll find your settlers just walking into walls constantly janky gameplay and movement combat is slow and choppy AI voices is becomes annoying very quickly random crashing i can not recommend this game in it's current state and would suggest avoiding if you want something similar grab medieval dynasty it is more flushed out and polished

Kingdom Come Deliverance & Medieval Dynasty had a baby

Stupid brigands don't allow me to complete quests in the towns. I have to kill them all every single time to even talk to the quest people

I can't recommend this game in good conscience even though I definitely like it. While I really do enjoy the building aspects of the game, I find the combat extremely simple and boring. The best way to do combat is to pick just about any weapon and never attack in the same direction as your last and don't attack from the right against a shield opponent. That's it. If there is more to it I have either not discovered it in over 130 hours of gameplay or it just isn't useful enough for me to go looking for it. Now what I will say is that this game does scratch and odd itch for me. As far as 3d colony sims go. This is honestly one of the better ones I've seen. I've been aching for a 3d rimworld and this is the closest I've seen. The villagers (usually) do what I want them to. I do find acquiring more villagers passed 25+ to be harder and harder in an unfun way. I really want to make a bustling city with walls and sectors but I can only do so much when (what seems like mid game) I am getting limited in my "sandbox" fun. My final gripe is the building and general netcode. If you find getting stuck on poorly surfaced DICE game terrain is really annoying then you will have some of this. Anyone who has played the recent battlefronts knows how annoying it is to get stuck, bouncing off the same poorly designed rock over and over again. This game does that sometimes and does have a useful unstuck key. The building also falls under this. For some god forsaken reason the game dev decided to add a stupid, useless, building restriction system. I can't place my walls flush against the terrain because the terrain is poorly hitboxed onto the actual physical decal of the object. You cannot place things inside of other things (which affects nothing but limits creativity which is nice.) There are instances where I would like to place a gate or wall to prevent bandit expansion using a certain path, only for a small gap the be open because a rock cannot be removed and is in the way. This game honestly has a lot going for it but it gets hamstrung by all the little inconsistences this game has. They are a specific type of inconsistences that really make my ideas for this sandbox fall flat and its very infuriating. If none of these issues bother you then I say go for it, it really does have decent gameplay and you can get around the bland combat by amassing troops.

Игра интересная, что-то вроде Маунта, только в малых рамках. Потенциал многообещающий. Есть плюсы, но минусы куда больше перевешивают. Начнём с плюсов: 1. Хорошая оптимизация 2. Очень интересные квесты, тому кто их делал, надо памятник поставить. 3. Хорошая система союзников, в бою не тупят и работают как надо. 4. Интересная история и красивые пейзажи. За амосферу тоже молодчики. Минусы: 1. Баланс долбанутый (Лучники Бригантов ебашат как с пулемёта, так ещё и точно в голову, даже фул тяж сносит за три стрелы, тоже самое с пехотой). Твои атаки не станят их, зато любой полученный урон тобой - стан и последующая смерть. 2. Механики щитов у НПС - Даже если они не подняли их, стрелы буквально липнут к ним, хотя ты стрелял в голову, тоже самое с ударами. 3. Союзники очень хреново качают навыки. Буквально, перс у меня с самого начала игры, но он не вкачал ни одного навыка (Самый качаемы навык - это готовка, ты получаешь опыт к ней, даже если ничего не готовишь) 4. Рейды (ответные атаки бригантов) - Ты отбил деревню, у тебя половина тел в лучшем исходе, так как возвращаемся к 1 минусу. А тут бац, держи сразу 12 тел из которых 5 лучников. Так ещё они прут не от базы, а уже находятся на окраине деревни. 5. Система процветания долбанутая. Ты качаешь деревни всеми силами, а потом здравствуйте, в очках -1500 за вклад в деревню. ♥♥♥♥, ты получаешь копейки за все действия, а тут тебе с нифига минус проц. Молчу ещё про несуществующих жителей, которые умирают от чего-то не понятного и тоже сносят приличное количество очков. 6. Система снаряжения для союзников не работает. Они не надевают поставленные для них прессеты, приходится вручную каждому выдавать. и т.д. В общем, игра хорошая, но есть куча "НО". Можете купить её, если нравится подобный жанр, но готовьтесь к охрениванию от багов и различных странных вещах. Можно посетовать на ранний доступ, но на момент написания отзыва, он уже 2 года.

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