First promise for christmas 2017:

New Content
- Conquer buildings
- troop management
- foreign wars
- MULTPLAYER
- 2 new maps

http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/311260/ss_2b0cecf4f77c10550a7fef610e73a2c9d672f22e.1920x1080.jpg?t=1506431447

Second promise for christmas 2017:

New Content
- Conquer buildings
- troop management
- foreign wars
- MULTPLAYER

- 2 new maps
- working politics
- office meetings
- trials
- final AI

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/776246368098206996/D7E03DC688D3EE4AC79613198D39B491103F0C69/

What we actually got for christmas 2017:

New Content
- Conquer buildings
- troop management
- foreign wars
- MULTPLAYER

- 2 new maps
- working politics
- office meeting
- trials
- final AI

- Added a "trash can" icon in the production menu

http://steamcommunity.com/app/311260/discussions/1/1621724915775279408/

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UPDATE 1 Feb 2018:
They kept lying about their release date when it was blatantly obvious they were not going to make it in time.
"Our goal is still Q2 2018."

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/925923491965128712/77BD3756A83006809EC8E6F4E8C0D1F524BDC5B7/
and
http://steamcommunity.com/app/311260/discussions/0/1693785035830917746/#c1700541698683474498
Q2 ends at June 30.
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UPDATE 26 Aug 2018:
After missing the release date "goal" by at least several months the old development team GolemLabs was "removed". The new and more competent dev team Purple Lamp was hired.
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UPDATE 26 Feb 2020:
Just tested this again. The ai is broken, stat system is broken, market balance is broken, class balance is broken, economy is broken, politics is broken, court system is broken, guild system is broken, multiplayer is broken, no building interiors, time passes too quickly and the map and zoom levels are too big for any kind of immersion.

On top of that, the bugtracker you are supposed to use to report these, does not allow you to view existing tickets, your own tickets, communicate to devs for re-testing, feedback and validation of fixes, basically removing your ability to open tickets and track their progress in an efficient manner.
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UPDATE 28 Jun 2022:
So the game has finally been released. A complete product.

What's still missing from the original road map:
- Modding
- troop management (?)
- societies (?)
- soup kitchens (?)
- working MULTPLAYER, it seems. works for like half of the players atm
- office meetings (at least the mandatory ones)
- final AI (the AI pretty much unnoticeable in this game)
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How's the rest of the final game?
- The ai is unnoticeable
- stats system is useless (just put all points in charisma)
- market balance is broken
- economy is broken and boring
- class balance is broken (herbalist/fisherman/orchardist make 100k per round after round 10)
- politics kinda work and are boring
- court system is useless
- guild system is a waste of time
- multiplayer is broken only half of the time and there is no LAN functionality(!)
- no building interiors
- time passes too quickly and the map and zoom levels are too big for any kind of immersion.
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UPDATE 29. Oct. 2022

The G3 moderation now applies a full on censor mode claiming the things and screenshots that are documented in this very review are 'knowingly spreading misinformation'.
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1869583325948417878/B530150249A8FEC8100129F792F335170781CF92/

Avoid at all cost.

Feel free to comment.

Comments are open if you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer.

Do not buy, the game is FAR from being finished.
1.Balance is COMPLETELY broken.
2.Combat is COMPLETELY broken.
3. AI is completely idiotic and not a threat even on impossible.
4. The game lacks A LOT of important, if not mandatory features to be played.

1.
Cheapest buildings (first tier) are also the most lucrative by far and makes T2 and above building just a waste of money and time.
Robbers cost hardly anything and earn about 5 time as much as other broken T1 business (also helps you fight since the investment is gear).
NPC carry random amount of items regarding their ranks so when the game start you can just marry someone who has 20k worth of money, that's enough to grind through 33% of the game instantly and buy 4 fully kitted business and 4 titles.
Some buildings are just bad, opposed to other first tiers. The gap is so big you will waste more than 1h in comparison.
Poison is overhealed by passive regen of some NPCs (and you can even overheal it further with sleeping, great)

2.
Ranged weapons shoot once per target per fight with them, meaning 3 people will just oneshot instantly anyone and if it's another group of 3 whoever shoots first will win the fight in an anticlimatic 1 second.
Ranged weapons damage scale on your character damages (str+main weapon, so if you have a pistol and no weapon you will shoot for 15dmg, if you have a longsword, shoot for 80+, great right?)

3.
The AI won't ever be a threat to you even if you are in "impossible" difficulty, the game feels more like a sandbox rather than anything else in solo.
Sometimes they just attack with no gear at all and just die on your people.
Sometimes they just bomb but leave the place which doesn't destroy anything.
The AI makes dumb decisions such as making vote to make ambushes/pickpocketing/smuggling illegal despite being a robber and doing ambushes/pickpocketting etc etc... The opposite also happens, completely legal NPC allowing attacks and breaking bones. Most likely choices are randomly generated.
Your automated transporters will do ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ like taking a required ingredients from a business, go to market, not sell it, go back to business, put it down and take other ♥♥♥♥ and bring it to market to buy the first required ingredit then get back to business. Also automated employee will tend to priorize your barn storages and you can't chose whether or not they do that or which or when which means having a barn will make every transporter of the map ignore markets and pour things in the barn.

4.
There is hardly any control over commands and no shortcut to any orders but Go and Select.
There is even less control in making routes or automated storage etc. You CANNOT tell your people to do a specific route until X item is below/above/equal Y number. You CANNOT tell them to leave ONLY when there is X amount. You cannot select groups of items, meaning you have to select on all single of them if you wanna unload/load into a specific location.
You CANNOT give an area order to some actions that requires so. Basically you can tell music dudes to go play in a specific location (along a lot of orders) but you can't do that with money extorsion order or smuggling order (and much more) which will make your employee run across the whole ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ map just to do ONE action, then randomly chose someone else etc etc, waste of time making some building completely useless.

Honestly I am just fed up with a game with such potential but yet again brothers this is a game where devs will ignore complaints and won't investigate ♥♥♥♥ (just like they did on discord).
Also an alpha was ongoing for years and they still couldn't figure out things like these? I mean really, some of these issues are massive and almost gamebreaking (job breaking for some like extorsion or smuggling or just whole balance and combat situation). Also one of the moderator is a ♥♥♥♥ cause servers went ham at midnight and friends and I were constantly having internet issues (when we usually are okay) and I asked what he knew about it and banned me instantly for it.
Could be a great game, ♥♥♥♥ game, ♥♥♥♥ discord, won't be fixed, not worth your time.

DEVELOPERS PLEASE READ!

First of all let me say, I LOVE THIS GAME. Coming from someone who has never played any of the other guild games, I love the in dept amount of detail to daily living. This game has so much potential and the dev's are killing it with what they have so far. I'm going to recommend this game for the following reasons. I've played this for nearly 9 hours the past 2 days.
- Great RPG Feel
- Great POLITICAL SYSTEM - LOVE THIS
- Realistic Dynasty feeling
- In dept groups and alliance systems
- Romance and heir system
- Different options for clothing, armor, weapons etc
- Own housing
- Different options for play throughs.

Now to the Developers, I hope you read this because I have a few things that I think that are things that turn this game off to players. These also consist of bugs that make the game very hard to play.

1. The Judge scene. First of all I love that this is in the game, but it needs to be optional. This needs fixed almost immediately and is my number one concern. You cannot even consider taking a guard job because its back to back unskippable judge scenes. I actually had to revert my save to an older save because I couldn't even get to my bar to quit my office job. This needs to be a number one priority because this is game breaking.
2. Please look into a way to auto repair buildings. I own many MANY buildings and going to each one to repair, is tedious and time consuming. If you miss one, you may be screwed.
3. Along with the above, I have 4 times as many employees as building. Those employees die and going around to each one to trying to remember where that building is located to hire a new employee is difficult. Wish there was an option to auto hire employees like you can make the works auto run as well.
4. No one buys anything from the buildings. Only off the shop. So putting anything in your building windows to sell means it will stay there forever, no matter how cheap they are.
5. I currently have 400 alerts, and the majority of them are about trial results. Please... make it stop.
6. The game sometimes crashes when I check out events or the calendar of things I have to do today.
7. Please add a tutorial. I had to watch a youtube video of a guy for 2 hours playing because I had no clue how to start or what to do.
8. The faces of those working in the building are overtop of the building, which makes it hard to click on the building. Can you move the faces of the people below?
9. The people say the same things over and over (not a priority).
10. When you try to buy a building, a lot of the times you press the button and nothing happens. It took me a while to realize that nothing will happen UNLESS you have enough money to buy the building. So it would be helpful if you put something that says you don't have enough funds or something that lets players know this information if they try and buy a building.
11. Would be great to see people interact with you differently if you held public office. Make an approval rating. If people disapprove of your work, maybe people shout at you on the street. If people approve of you, then maybe the circle around you and cheer. An office approval rating would be AWESOME.

Anyway, as I said. I love, love, love this game. Its a good price for the game in the state that it is in thus far. If you are on the fence about getting it, go ahead and buy it! To the devs, I hope you read this and consider my suggestions. Thank you for reading!!

The Guild 3 has had its ups and downs, with its most noticeable shock being the switchover in development from Golemlabs to Purple Light Studios in 2018. But Purple Light Studios have managed to turn an awful early-access release into a worthy continuation of the Guild series.

For someone who enjoyed Guild 2 Renaissance considerably, the early access release for TG3 was a heavy disappointment. The graphics looked great, but the physics, animations and overall depth of the game was lacking brutally, with parts of the game being heavily unfinished and underdeveloped. And I've yet to mention that it ran worse than Cyberpunk 2077 allegedly did on old-gen consoles. I'm going to be frank: It took me a couple of years to pick the game back up after that, and by then, it had already improved massively in the hands of Purple Light Studios. Characters had received actual voices instead of Text-To-Speech voiceovers, and professions were developed further. The game had received new animations for jobs that required them, and character interactions became enjoyable with the addition of voice acting. I wholeheartedly recommend it to everyone who might enjoy a game where you run a high medieval-era business while climbing the ranks of nobility with your lowborn dynasty.
Consider this the end of the actual review, with my rant on the only 2 issues I have with the game compared to previous versions.


The first issue I have with the game is the production time of goods. The production time of produced items is very, very slow. I get what the developers have tried to do here. They've separated the production of each worker instead of merging them into one, like in previous games. For example, if you had 3 people working on the same item, it would take less time to complete a task. This element is replaced in The Guild 3 by having each worker have their own production efficiency and production queue. This means that instead of the all workers producing a single type of item together for 20 minutes, they all produce their own item in an hour. The problem is very noticeable in businesses where you handle sales of high-tier items on the front desk. In the Guild 2 Reneissance, for example, if you owned an inn and produced porridge, you'd make 4 porridge per completed production. For higher tier items, the number of items produced would at least be 2. In my current patron-style playthrough of The Guild 3, I'm unable to stock the front desk of my pub with anything but the item I'm producing, if even that, as the production of items takes way too long. This could be balanced with either the return of multi-item production, or a reduction in production times for higher-tier items. I don't get how the base production speed of 1 barrel of alcohol is only 16 minutes while making one sausage, THAT'S RIGHT, ONE SAUSAGE takes 2 hours and 10 minutes. I'm mad.

Purple Lamp Studios. You've done amazingly with the game in the past couple of years. But please, for our sanity, could we get some balancing in production times?
As for the second thing I noticed: There's a lack of information on what new powers each council role gives you. Currently, there are vague explanations, like "The Captain is responsible for the security in the city", without actually explaining what new actions you could take in that role. Could we get more specific information in the tooltips for office roles?

I've been a fan of the Guild games since back in the early 2000s in the days of 1400. Waited a long time to pick up TG3 due to all the bad reviews.

Looking quickly through the reviews I've spent quite a bit more time playing TG3 than most, so I felt it was a duty to really give a proper review. At this point I've played each profession up to at least Lord in TG3.

First off, theres a nice list of cities to play. They vary in physical size greatly from very small maps for just a few dynasties to massive maps like the Paris map playable by 16 dynasties.

When you choose your map to play, you will also choose exactly how many dynasties will start out with you, difficultly level, years per turn, and what "skill level" of a career to begin your character with. There are two options for your characters starting skill level, either start completely from the bottom with only one business and work your way up from nothing. Or start slightly better off, with your first profession skills leveled up and allowed to buy a couple business from the start.

After that we move on to our actual character! Think of a name, or let the game generate one for you. As of now there's a handful of customization for your character, a few outfits to start with, few faces to choose from, body sizes, and of course a family crest for your new dynasty.

Finally now we can get to building our empire! Depending on your game setup options you will start off with a home in either the walled city or on the outskirts in one of the surrounding villages. You can choose to either buy an existing business or start up your own.

Each existing profession has a few buildings and upgrades. Each building has lots of addons such as storage space, building security, additional transporters, and many more even disease protection! With each building upgrade you will allot capacity for more addons to your business.

Next we will need to ensure our dynasty lasts! We need a family and children! So we embark on a romance and try to find our mate! This system is straight forward. Havent had any issues. (big family is very helpful!)

The political system is very detailed, each elected position feels like a little step up in power, each position has control of specific laws in the city and a few little "perks" rising up the ranks feels a bit too easy though later on in the game. Once you have things rolling, it does become a bit "mindless".

The AI definitely needs some help from the devs, other dynasties often die off early game. I've been intentionally helping them start out to keep the later game as interesting as possible. And that has definitely worked well the AI has a hard time getting its own empire set up. But if you give them a business or two for their profession they actually do run it decently. They just dont seem to set up their own business' well, unless they are Rogues.

There's a LOT of diplomatic options or aggressive options to lead your dynasty to greatness (especially if you're a rogue with some strong henchmen)

I have yet to experience any game breaking bugs. Couple of spastic graphics here and there, which if you arent max zoomed in,you can't even notice. Another issue has been transporter routing, so place your business' carefully look at the map check the resource locations for your business and plan well. It will make a big difference.

All in all I have been extremely pleased with everything, maybe the game was much worse before but now it's really great for an early access game. I look forward to the future updates which seem to come every month or so.

BEFORE you look at the reviews understand something, the game development was taken over by new people that are fixing what was broken and adding to/improving upon the game. IT'S GOT TO BE A MASSIVE UNDERTAKING TO WORK ON A GAME THAT WAS SO BROKEN AND TO FIGHT PAST THE OLDER TERRIBLE REVIEWS FROM WHEN IT WAS ABANDONED, FOR THIS DEVS YOU HAVE MY THANKS. It use to be a completely unplayable chunk of data that use to only serve the purpose of taking up space on your drive. THIS GAME IS AWESOME. I've played 2 and 3 won't disappoint you. I'd recommend this game completely.

Honestly, I imagined the successor of The Guild 2 completely different.
I absolutely cannot recommend it, moreover, ever rather than in "current state".
Why?
It is simplified in actually EVERY aspect comparing to The Guild 2, one of my favorite games of all time. This is NO LONGER an RPG game nor a good simulator, just an average strategy game. The Guild 2 is so deep, addictive, where the biggest problem is with bugs, ubiquitous bugs: with animations, sounds, multiplayer mode etc.
BUT!
It is not actually better in The Guild 3, let's compare the Game released in 2006 to the game of 2020:
1) you cannot select several characters at once using your mouse, really?! It is possible in The Guild 2.
2) employee after the work (10pm - 4am) just MAGICALLY vanished himself! What the hell?! Comparing it to The Guild 2: Employee just stop working and goes to the inn/church/sleep.
3) you CANNOT enter to any building, excluding your residential house, but you cannot move around there, and characters there are just "tripods", a cheeky way to make easy money - welcome to XXI century.
Comparing to TG2: You can enter to EVERY building, some of them have even 2 or 3 rooms, excluding fisherman's hut, but even your character is never inside.
4) a court hearing is a matter of two clicks, very boring, stupid as ****, no trial dialogues, four options for sentence, no attempt to convince the court. It hurts! Do you read it, devs? You hit me directly in the face for what you did to this game! Comparing to TG2: dialogue with choice options, success depending on your skills, EIGHT options for sentence (innocent, small fine, big fine, loss of title, stocks, prison, exile, death) and you can try to "convince" the court.
5) promotion in the social ladder with one click. Comparing to TG2: You have to directly go to the town hall, pay the clerk and wait. Again, simplified and unreal in the "newer" The Guild!
6) the characters overlap = there is no physics, no collisions, body stuck into another body, so ugly and do not deserve to name it a "game". Cimparing to TG2, there is the same problem, but c'mon, it is 2006 game, so I would like to see ANY progress, but I don't see.
7) I saw Landsknechts, many of them on the market, of course read point number "6". When I zoomed in on their faces, what did I see? ALL THE FACES THE SAME!!! even the face generator is a problem for them ... it was not that mad even in TG2, it is way better there!
8) You can upgrade only about 10% of the buildings, really?! Comparing to TG2: you are able to upgrade EVERY building excluding sawmill and quarry, there are always 3 levels of each, and the appearance of the building changes every time. There are even more residential houses
9) I always chose a fisherman in TG2 at the beginning, You have to build it close to the river or sea, it has a sense right? you have a fishing boat, but no way in TG3, you build it just in the village and run to to another part of the world to get some fish, stupid.
10) some kind of development of the previous point (9) - you CANNOT build farmland, hive, grove etc. just like it was in TG2, just another simplified! and very stupid!
11) Animations are so bad, even in a little "wooden" The Guild 2 it was way better! An example: I motivate employees, what does my character do? he waves his stupid finger a hundred times in the same way, very stiff, and nobody, not even a single one employee pays attention to it XD sick!
12) So less dialogues, animations, comparing to TG2. An example: You cannot see such an important element of the Middle Ages as, for example, the mass at the church! Why? Again, because you cannot enter to any building!!!!!
13) Maybe the world itself looks better than the one in TG2, but still, it is far from good. A cow lying forever in front of the butcher's building is one of the ugliest things I have ever seen! Like from game of 2002, even TG2 looks better there, and personally, in my opinion, characters (their faces) looks nicer in TG2, not in TG3!
14) town hall elections are also strange. Just one click and you are a candidate, there is NO meeting with the candidates. Comparing to TG2, you have to submit your candidacy personally, and there is a meeting in which you can try to convince the right people.
15) there is no use in controlling the workshop manually, you can set up auto control. Comparing to TG2: You can set up auto control, but if more things AI has to control (you choose how many), the bigger "salary" for the "manager" you have to pay! So it makes sense to control the workshop manually - you just earn more money! And it is very sensibe!
16) It is no longer an RPG game. In TG3 you have 5 "talents" (strenght, agility, intelligence, perception, charisma), in TG2 You have 10 "talents" (constitution, dexterity, charisma, martial arts, handicrafts, stealth, rhetoric, empathy, bargaining, arcane knowledge). In TG2 you can level up from 1 to 10, gaining an additional skill to choose from at a certain level, while you have nothing like this in TG3.
17) being a thief is much better in TG2, it looks just so cool, you have much more options
18) In The Guild 2 you can get sick from many diseases, from toothache, to colds, flu, pneumonia and even black death, there is no such diversity in The Guild 3, if there is any, I played about 80 in-game years, did not have even a single one disease, not anyone of my family.
19) earning is too easy and fast, there is no danger, no risk, no difficulty, no emotions, no events, just nothing!
It was easy to earn in TG2 as well, but still harder than here! The thieves were more burdensome and the wages for the workers greater, if there are wages for workers in TG3, honestly I have never seen any drop in earnings, lol.
20) Settlements flourished in The Guild 2, grew and got new rights, more offices to fill. It was also influenced by you, the player! In The guild 3 you have it constant. And you have it divided into villages and a city (in The Guild 2 you have up to 4 settlements, every village might get the new rights and become a city ... or not, you never know,
21) In The Guild 2 you have items to craft or buy on the market that are disposable, that gives you a temporary boost to an attribute (in combat, stealth etc.), you could, for example, perfume yourself before a council meeting! and increasing your chances to get a position or keep it! There is nothing like this in TG3!!!

NO SPACE TO WRITE MORE AS A REVIEW
I wanted to see improved, content-enriched: in animations, buildings, dialogues, mechanics. Not so brazenly stripped-down game!

What is good in The Guild 3 comparing to The Guild 2?
- character can mount a horse
- you can have any use of your child, now you can move him/them wherever you want to and there are a child's special actions, nice!
- a person can be skinny or fat, nice mini addon
- city ​​law - you can choose which action shall legal and which shall be illegal. It is more interesting than in The Guild 2, where you are able only to choose strictness of law (strict, fair, mild) and tax rate (10%/20%/30%). BTW. I do not understand why it is not included in The Guild 3?! And I feel unsatisfied with the choice of city rights, there should be more of them :)

It is way too less for saying TG3 is a worthy successor. Stay away from this! it doesn't even look like a game from a serious and aged company! Just like a bad one indie game!

Devs if you read, tell me, how is it possible that The Guild 2 from 2006 is many times better than The Guild 3? Are we not progressing in programming? what I saw means it is rather the opposite! How did you do it? Maybe there was too serious change in the team? Ask yourself, devs, what is better, TG2 or TG3, honetly, and think about what you did horribly wrong!

Ultimately: I wish to see a remaster of the The Guild 2, there is no hope for The Guild 3, the core of the game is just damaged!
Meanwhile, turn on The Guild 2 Renaissance, have fun!

There's a lot of potential here, but one critical flaw keeps me from recommending The Guild 3.

In The Guild 3, there are other dynasties. Those dynasties have the ability to spread rumors about your dynasty members. On the surface, this seems fine - and I admit it's an idea I like. The execution, however, is horrendous.

Problem 1: It won't be your enemies slandering you. They might. Far more often than not, by my experience, it's your allies. Those dynasties with high and even maxed reputation with you will spam your dynasty members with slanderous rumors every chance they get.

Problem 2: The way slandering works is that it applies a debuff to your dynasty member that causes every (or most) villagers who pass by that dynasty member in the streets applying a negative reputation to your dynasty member for that district.

Taken together, these two problems pigeon-hole players into one particular playstyle. While many players will want to open up shops in the middle of a busy section of the city, buy all kinds of reputation-boosting gears, and spend their time building relationships in the district - this is actually how you end up with the lowest reputation.

On the other hand, if you put your dynasty members out on the very edge of the map, where no-one ever walks by (and thus the impact of slander is negligible), don't bother equipping any reputation-boosting gear or engage in reputation-building activities, and have them only venture out to murder other dynasty members, all while having your stores operated entirely by faceless NPCs - this is how you get the highest reputation level.

It's stupid. It's backwards. It's about as un-fun as you might imagine. Until it's fixed, The Guild 3 is a medieval business simulator where playing as a sociopath recluce and murder-hobo isn't just the best way to play - it's the ONLY way to play without the town hating you.

If you enjoy playing as a sociopath, dive right in. Me? I'll wait until I see a patch.

I know what Early Access is. I can forgive a few imperfections here and there. But this game is VERY far from playable, let alone enjoyable. I'd look the other way if I could at least see that the core gameplay is an improvement over The Guild 2. Sadly it is not. And I don't see it becoming so. Even so I will keep an open mind and may change this review based on it's progress.

- Social standing is heavily dumbed down. Your rank is now a simple progress bar that fills alongside XP rather than through a combination of wealth, fame and bribing city officials in TG2. You don't even need to visit the city hall anymore. This means that your farmer that never leaves his farmstead will eventually become high nobility just because he farms. One moment you are harvesting some wheat and *poof* a magical letter from the Major sais you are part of the social elite.

- No building interiors. Even though they feature prominently in the promotion material and on the store page. This is a real shame because these were a major part of what gave TG2 it's charm. The game world has lost so much immersion because of it. No more hanging out in the Inn or watching dying plague victims in the hospital. No more watching characters being tortured or rotting in dungeons, dancing at lavish parties in patricians houses. No dramatic court cases leading to public executions, etc, etc, etc...

- Family life has been gutted. One of the most fun things to do in TG2 was courting your spouse, getting married and seeing the family grow together in the house with all those fun little animations. That is all gone now. The game taunts you by telling you that you need to get married ASAP in a loading screen. However peasants can't marry because the romance abilities are now locked behind social class levels. Do they mean to tell us that peasants didn't have children? The wedding is now a crappy cutscene that plays even though your character is still standing in the middle of the road on the exact spot where he met his wife three seconds ago. There is no courtship what so ever. 'wanna get married?' ... 'I never heard of you but since I like your face texture, sure! Let's do it stranger!' After that your wife will start to automatically pop out children because reproduction no longer requires physical contact between the husband and the wife. In fact, my character never even meets his(?) children because there is zero reason or incentive to visit your house.

- Terrible UI. Nothing feels intuitive! Even something as simple as accessing my character inventory was a chore to find out. In the last game I could click a building and the possible interactions for said building would pop up. The way it works now is that your character needs to walk all across the huge map and you hope the building does what your common sense tells you it should which more often than not leads to disappointment. For example I haven't even been able to figure out how to apply for an office at all. I can't talk to a clerk anymore because the city hall is just an outer shell without rooms inside. Buying stuff from the market interface is a complete pain in the ass because you can click until you are blue in the face but it won't register 4/5 times. Also it is very hard to know at which exact point in the sprawled out market your character or transport needs to stand to interact with it. Kind of a big problem in a trading game! You character has few abilities and even fewer social interactions compared to TG2, but for some reason they are all buried in far too many sub-menus with just one or two buttons in them. One of the few benefits of offering so little to do in the game should have been a slick UI at least, but even that didn't happen.

- Fake people and economy. At least in TG2 it took me the better part of a full playthrough before I started to see through the lie because at least it was a convincing one. My heart sank when I saw that TG3 is no better or even worse. The NPC's don't have daily routines anymore and just aimlessly wander around the map. Their job is to make it seem like they are part of a world where everything is interconnected but really they are useless as anything but eyecandy. No one but the player actually buys products at shops or those in the marketplace. The rest of the goods simply get magically added or subtracted over time. This becomes painfully apparent when you first start the game and the marketplace runs out of the precious starting supply of carts within the first few minutes while you can't afford to buy them yet. You don't see these carts entering into the traffic flow at all and there aren't a bunch of business owners crowding the marketplace scrambling to get them. You will be the only person standing there watching them simply vanish from the game for no reason. They aren't getting bought but rather deleted in a steady trickle. I know there will be rebalancing in the form of magical products being spawned/despawned, but is it really too much to ask that a game that focuses on trade uses actual supply and demand to distribute goods around the world? I'd love to actually compete against the other dynasties instead of the game playing pretend. If this is too hard to program then at least create a convincing illusion that the AI's are actually producing, transporting, consuming and thriving in a way that makes us believe they are following the same rules as the player. Make the NPC's actually stop at the market stalls and at the shops once a while, for example.

- Map size. They increased the map size while restricting our movement to just the roads that are unnecessarily long. This makes logistics an even bigger chore than it ever was before.

- Bugs & crashes. These are to be expected in an EA. Though I wonder why they were in such a rush to release it on steam in such an early state. Placing or upgrading buildings or even just clicking characters, which you'll agree are pretty important to be able to play this game will often result in random crashes.

- Text events. These are like chance cards in monopoly. In a board game these can work. Not so much in a simulator where I can see what my character is actually up to. So when a text event pops up saying how my character got insulted at the bar while he is sowing a field my immersion is broken instead of enhanced.
My starting character got an event saying he made money on real estate speculation. How? I own a shack and I juggle for a living. I stopped a murder? Again: how? I was just away making coffee. Did I miss something actually exciting? Stop telling me stuff that didn't happen! It seems like the text events try to sound spectacular to make up for how hollow the actual gameplay is.
Give us back the scrapped social interactions so we can make our own REAL events that made The Guild fun. Duels, romance, parties, wars... these were all fully animated and randomly occuring events in the Guild 2 that you could become part of and had real consequences in the game world. This new text feature is depressing to players who know what they have replaced.

- POTATO? WHAT'S A POTATO? You will learn to despise this phrase. It's the only full sentence your character knows. And boy oh boy does he love saying it! Over and over and over again. Fortunately the game allows you to dial the voice audio to 0%.

Overall verdict: Some of my complaints are fixable and some seem to be part of the new direction the devs are taking for this game franchise. The reality is that there are far better trade games out there and that by watering down the details and charm that made the Guild unique we aren't left with any reason to play this. Stay away from The Guild 3 for the next few months. You will not enjoy it in it's current state.

tl;dr : Very buggy, dumbed down and devoid of the charm that made TG2 a buggy but lovable mess. This time we just get the mess. Keep this game on your watch list for a few months, then check the reviews again.

I love the Guild series, and ever since this game was pitched I was wanting it. That being said, I been watching the development since the start of EA.

The original pitch was just like the previous Guild titles, with adding a few things. In all honesty, it looked like it'd be quite some fun and not a buggy mess, the original dev team seemed to really enjoy the core that was The Guild. However...

The dev teams switched, so it appears, mid production and the ideas have changed. They are making a game more akin to Patrician, without the boats and trading, than The Guild. Sure, your workers work, produce things, etc, but it just feels like it's a numbers game. You watch numbers, you have too many automated controls, and things just don't feel right.

in The Guild 2, you are rewarded for manual control of your buildings. You don't expand super rapid, you build your character, your family, and your business up. You establish a niche and a market. You flesh out your specialty, before venturing into others. You decide what to create and when, how to control the raw materials, and all in all, feels like you are running your business.

in The Guild 3, you get too many business buildings too fast, you turn on an automated production, and it just produces things. These production queues and automation just feels cheap, you build building, it produces, and you just kind of leave it. You gain too many building options too fast, and you just kinda manage spreadsheets and numbers. Not what the Guild was to me.

I been holding out, as it's Early Access, that they'd bring in that immersive feeling of managing, and being part of the game. Having the feeling of weight behind your decisions, and feeling like you actually are part of the world. Seeing people go from place to place, having to manage your transportation and businesses, as well as keeping your reputation in check, but after following the dev diaries of late, no, it's not even planned.

Interiors were a core part of The Guild, seeing your people work, seeing the townsfolk enjoying your buildings, pubs, churches, money lenders, etc. Being able to not just stare at a map, but have a sort of role playing feel to it. Seeing how busy your public house is in the afternoon shows how well your business is doing, not just from numbers, but from visuals. looking inside told a lot of the people that work there, and the customers. Looking inside the courthouse, seeing meetings, talking to the town clerk about granting higher citizenship, bribing public officials, etc etc, all worked so well in the Guild 2, but in The Guild 3? axed. I am sorry, without the core parts of what made The Guild series good, this doesn't feel like a Guild game at all. it feels like a spinoff.

If the developers really want to make a new Guild game, they need to listen to their playerbase, and what they want out of it. So far, they been just digging in their heels with their ideas, trying to explain themselves on their development ideas, yet don't listen and change scope to what their players want. Most will be fine with waiting longer times to get a game they want, especially in Early Access. I am sure if they put it to a vote, having full building interiors (For all buildings) would be a majority of what people want.

TL;DR, I love the Guild, yet this game is not The Guild. This game is a spinoff, and is only The Guild in name only. The devs don't know what the Guild fans really want, and aren't listening. I will change this review if this changes, but as of right now, I do not recommend investing if you are a fan of the Guild series.