So I've finally finished the game and it was awesome! Even better than I expected. Firmly gripped me for a whole week without letting go and that is my good sign that this game is a solid GOTY contender, at least in rpg department. Very good job, devs! With what resources you had, you've managed to create something really special here. You made me remember how much I miss those old Infinity Engine crpg games like Baldur's Gate, Planescape: Torment and Icewind Dale.
I hope this game, along with upcoming Pillars of Eternity and Torment: Tides of Numenera will spark a new renaissance of that type of games. All true rpg fans certainly need more of this. And I wish that your new project, whatever and whenever it will be, will totally rock as well!
And if you do another kickstarter campaign, do count me in, I'll support you as much as I can
Now to the harsh complaints and humble suggestions:1. Skill bar is too limiting - as was suggested during the beta, it seriously needs to contain more slots. The best way to approach this is to dynamically elongate the bar to the screen resolution, the other way is to increase the number of bars. 3 is totally not enough, especially in the late game. And make the bar change buttons bigger - those tiny ones are no good.
2. Return the radial inventory menu - icons were much more readable than a plain tiny list. I don't get why you removed it, please return it if you can.
3. Inventory micromanagement, identifying, crafting is not only a chore, it's a total pain in the **s - it was mentioned many times before and bears repeating - this is a poorly implemented UI, no excuses. I understand your desire to make the game similar to Ultima VII, but some old game design choices are not neccesarilly the best - we live in a modern age, more convenient systems were invented and no real hardware\software restraints exist like in the old days.
It could have been so much easier to craft items from a list of found\succesfullly experimented recipes, like in Skyrim. Fiddling and rummaging within a small inventory window in search of compatible ingridients is very time consuming and boring. There's also no real point in having ingridients tab, because you can't craft everything from there. If you can't make crafting from list system then at least consider making the inventory window much bigger - people have big screen resolutions nowadays which can contain quite a lot.
As for the identifying - as was suggested before - make a button that identifies everything at once.
Also, to reduce the micromanagement chore, make identifying and crafting possible from any character inventory, with the Loremaster, Crafting ability level taken from the character with the highest score. Constantly dragging items from one inventory to the other is an annoying chore as well.
Also, make another sorting option -
By Type of the item.
4. Slow running and combat speed - also a common complaint - it is just too slow. Make an option to have various speed levels, like it is done in many turn based games, so that people don't have to resort to Cheat Engine unofficial fix to speed things up. Slow speed and terrible inventory micromanagement for no good reason waste an obsecene amount of time in the game.
5. Loot is uninspiring - unique items with fixed drop positions are almost non-existant. And with the exception of the Weresheep set there are no unique sets in the game, which is a shame - I enjoyed looking for fabled set pieces around the world in Divine Divinity. The drop even with high lucky charm rarely gets you legendary items even from bosses and in some locations it is even unbalanced by level - some locations have too low a level loot for the level of the party when they get there. So mostly the loot is a total junk good only for selling. But I've gathered so much money with nothing to spend it on in the late game that I've stopped picking up anything except the occasional legendary loot.
6. Vendors' lack of gold and lack of things to spend it on - it is strange to me that a simple fish and vegetables vendor have thousands of gold pieces on them, while others have practically no gold at all. I found it quite difficult to sell all the junk that I was collecting in the game, because vendors were constantly out of money or had no money to begin with. The items they're selling are uninspiring as well - nothing you can't find or craft yourself. The only exception is the interdimensional trader, who sells legendary items.
7. Lack of "Alright, we'll do as you say" option for the second character - I don't like the stupid rock-paper-scissors game in general, but I can tolerate it during npc encounters as a persuasion system. However, constatly having to play it when arguing with a second character while playing a single player mode is no fun - there is an option to automatically agree for the controlled character, but no option to do that for the second one. Make it an option, if you can, because I'm not holding my breath for the coming of wide variety of AI personalities.
So these are my major complaints about the game. I hope your continued support of this game means not only fixing bugs but improving its gameplay as well.
