Spoilers may accidentally abound, reader beware!
Just finished my first run through of the Alpha, and I have to say, I loved this!! I'm going to ramble a bit regarding my impressions and ideas.
Ran this with Ifan. Ended up level 8 after the worm fight. I stacked about 9 oil/ooze barrels around TRP on the stairs, then snuck everyone else around to teleport all the baddies into the circle, then a single phoenix dive turned the world into MASS CHAOS hahahaha... love this game. Such sandbox. Many option. Wow.
I'll second a notion I've read here recently, namely loot shouldn't be SO random! Nobody wants +2 Intelligence on a dagger, because it won't help you wield a dagger more effectively! Memory is useful, probably, but not as valuable as primary stats, and resistances are also valuable. Make the buff fit the weapon class though! +2 str two-handed staff doesn't do anybody any good at all.
Also, it would be nice to be able to 'scale' gear up once you've leveled past its original usefulness. Case in point, TRP managed to buy the Sundering Cleaver (with an "unknown" flavor text [sadface]), a unique two-handed axe, somewhere around level 5, shortly after escaping the fort proper. This was the only thing he carried thereafter, all the way off the island. I'd have spent good... points... whatever they end up being, to re-level this awesome thing to suit the level 9 version TRP, scaling the base damage according, even if this was exorbitantly expensive (isn't everything??).
This is Alpha, so I'm chalking this up to incompletion. After you kill Alexander, Ifan calls back what's his name, uhh, Kaleksomething, and confirms that, yes, the deed is done, and yes I'm alone (I was, at the time, unlinked and a good 100m away from the rest of the party), Hasslehoff pops off saying "Yeah, lemme check on that, I'll get right back to you." ... and never shows up again, right? There's not actually anything else to do with that, because Alpha, right?
The idea that the narrative creates is that there really is only one Godwoken, namely your player character. Does this mean only one character will ever learn Bless? That bums me out a bit, but again, first act of the Alpha, so, it's all good.
Oh, yeah, you might want to disable the character skills during the vision segment, because I was curious and teleported myself into a deadly fight with imaginary gods and died while the rest of my party slept (ha! true story!), and I had no way to return save for loading a save.
Ok, maybe I'm the only one OCD enough to care about this, but I really do care SO HARD about this: can we PLEASE have some variety in inventory containers?! And maybe even some proper auto-sorting? I want to open my *all* invo screen and see tidy little icons like quiver for arrows, padded grenade bag, potion crate, food box, armor chest, weapon rack... I mean, if you're going to carry 310 kilograms of 2 meter staffs and fluid barrels, please let's organize it all! Failing that, at LEAST let us apply some color, plain to see in the inventory screen, to different bags. That way I know the red bag is grenades, the brown one is scrolls, the blue one is potions, or whatever. Also, that way, if one and only one character is carrying a quiver, it's safe to say that loot arrows automatically go there, and likewise for a grenade sack or food crate, etc, etc. I spent the whole (admittedly long) time carrying around a huge ORANGE stuffed with other edibles, just because I could look at the screen and know what was supposed to be in it. I also knew that if I saw a pumpkin in someone's inventory randomly, I knew where to stash it.
More to come from me likely, but that's all for now!
